This week we've continued to iterate on our two big ideas, and we were able to get a couple of testing sessions done with our first prototypes. The response from the testers was promising, and I think we've got something here in both of our concepts. We're swiftly approaching our first milestone and things seem to be on track. We're a little worried about potential scope issues on these games as they're both fairly asset and programming reliant (in varying amounts), so one of my goals has been iterating on the game concepts and trying to tune them down into more direct and cohesive experiences. Given the short development cycle we have for this project I feel like it's very important that we focus our design(s) as much as possible. Every piece of our game will have to be important, because we just won't have resources to devote to unimportant or unrewarding systems or assets.
Simplicity in game design is something I really value. It's a bit of a contradiction with the sorts of games I like as a player, which include a lot of really dense and complicated strategy games like Magic: the Gathering and DotA, but as a developer it's one of my top priorities. I really admire the recently released game Divekick for this sort of simplicity. It's a fighting game where you have, in addition to movement, two controls: jumping, and performing a diving kick whilst jumping. Pretty simple; you basically understand the whole game by reading its title. The beauty of it is how deep the gameplay actually is. Any direct hit from a kick will instantly KO your character, so it becomes a very careful dance of jumping and attacking as both players try to set up a solid hit while preventing their opponent from doing the same. You have to keep your movements unpredictable and always be thinking ahead of your opponent, but on the other hand it's just as rewarding to play as a button-mashing mess. Maybe less rewarding on a competitive level but it sure is fun to be flying all over the place, looking for that one big hit. Divekick is very easy to comprehend and explain, but it holds a surprising amount of depth in such simple mechanics. A lot of it is created by the players themselves and how they interact with the systems and compete with each other, and that's the core of a competitive game. It's the full experience of an intense, neck and neck fighting match distilled down to the most fun moment. It skips all the incremental build up present in most fighting games and goes straight for the part everyone will remember: landing an earth-shattering kick on your friend's face.
That's the kind of elegance of intent and design that I'm looking for in both of our concepts. We'll get a lot further focusing on and polishing one resonant experience than if we try to tackle something complicated and dependent on many systems. The Mole game seems to have a pretty clear hook that the testers responded to, that being outsmarting your friends/enemies in an interactive environment, and now I'm looking at what directions I can push that in to emphasize this fun. Even our rough prototype is getting a solid amount of excitement from testers laying down traps and executing really clutch surprise maneuvers, and I want to maximize that sort of second-to-second tactical and strategic engagement as well as the big water cooler moments when a plan comes together and someone gets wrecked. The fighting and deckbuilding game is a little more complicated because of how the hook is a little divorced from the "actual" gameplay. We're looking at ways to combine these two parts and make it feel more like a single game than two distinct stages, both in a mechanical and a conceptual way. Some questions still remain in what players will find most compelling about it once the drafting system has been implemented in the prototype, but the only way to find out is to keep sitting people in front of it.
See y'all in a week.
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