Capstone 6 A ray of hope

As I spoke briefly about in my last blog post we decided to make a radical change to the direction of our game in a last ditch effort to get something more presentable, fun, innovative, and simple to even have a chance to move forward.  We liked the idea of opposing forces attracting and repelling, we didn't like how bogged down and sluggish the game felt to not only watch but play.  We decided to make this game much, much faster.  And drop 85% of the mechanics/controls.  You are still a generator wheel...thing  the story behind which is still being worked on but now there are only 3 main controls.  left in right on the right control stick moves the character while the right control stick aims a polarized semi circle shield and right trigger changes that polarity.  The idea is similar, you have to navigate the space to the end of the level while avoid obstacles and using the environment to your advantage.  At a much higher speed and with more fluid interactions.  You can now climb on walls and ceilings if the walls are polarized and you aim your shield of opposite polarized towards it. There are speed boost that if you hit with the same polarity will send you flying in a specific direction to help you get places faster or over objects.  There will be projectiles that hone in on you that you can reflect by using your polarity shield of same color.

Overall the game is much more simple, fast paced, fluid and fun. Which is exactly what we were hoping for from the beginning.  We can only hope we figured this out with enough time to spare in order to continue to move forward. Only time can tell.  Wish us luck.

Capstone Innovation

We were recently assigned a group project to choose a game that we found innovative and write about how it accomplished these tasks.  Our group chose the game Journey on the PlayStation 3.  While I myself has never played it (who has time to play games now a-days)  I did a little research on it and it did some pretty amazing things for being a small project. Which I can say without a doubt inspired my team.  Journey had one goal, to tell a story.  It accomplished this feat without using any words/dialog and having players who do not know each other work together to accomplish tasks with the same constraints in place.  Journey fed of the psychological aspect of humans to create a powerful and lasting game, which immerses the player and captivates them to continue forward.  The world of Journey is a desert wasteland. While beautiful very lonely.  Journey uses a seamless player drop in/our system where after playing alone for hours you might run into another player online somewhere.  You don't know that person and you cant communicate with them  and unlock other massively Multiplayer games. Instead of trying to avoid this other player due to the emptiness of the world you feel drawn to them.  The game itself is also very simple.  It's like 3 buttons at most.  The game delivers a fun, captivating, and simple product.  This allows the game to reach a much larger audience.  This is exactly what our game is missing and is why after completing this assignment we took a 180° turn when it comes to the direction of our game.

Our game was way too complicated.  We had more controls then we knew what to do with.  It was artificially difficult due to the interactions with the world and controls.  The learning curve was through the roof and if we even wanted a chance to move forward we needed radical change.  Which is exactly what we did and what I will go over in my next blog post. See you there.

Capstone 5

Well, we challenged this week. I felt like it went horribly.  The prototype was messy. Our pretension ran too long.  Our mechanics are super over complicated and as Gilly and Evan attempted to demonstrate our prototype it became painfully obvious.  After attempting to sell our train wreck of a game we had a large meeting about how we were all on different pages. Chris pictured this game as a fast pace racer. Our designers looked at it more as a puzzler and I just wanted it to work better.  We decided to have a meeting at Chris's house for him to show us some games he thought we should be more like.  After watching them play a large variety of games that I can't remember the names of we stated that we were all on the same page and went back to work.  We somehow pasted stage one and started working on market research for stage two. Which for me meant just try to make the game work better while they worry about target demographic and so on.  Even with this "new" understanding our game was still very clunky people were very focused on story and there was still no fun game play to be had. We have a meeting about new innovation next week hopefully that will put us back on the right track because it's looking to be too late at this point.