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.
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