Guidance from the Masters (ft. Jarek and Hope)
So today after much celebration during the New Years, delivering on Ambition and anything else positive, we decide to call for a meeting with our lecturers showcasing our product and idea of how it would work.
Even though it wasn’t a presentation, more like a brief chat about the idea and where to move forward there was a little comment in relation to the upcoming Pitch presentation, which I did agree on, but we started talking about mechanics and where they go, how the narrative is and finally how the game looks so far. Pretty positive, but there definitely were some comments overall.
I’m going to break it down into 5 major parts so it’s easier to understand the comments that Team ENDGAME got:
Mechanics
As our game takes major inspiration from Portal, the design of the experience is farily linear and slightly outdated in regards to Jareks comments as it railroads the experience for the player, which at the time did make me think how should I approach Chapter 2. I felt as though for the beginning of the game I wanted the experience to be driven narratively, as we mentioned that Chapter 1 is essentially a prison break, so I felt some restriction was needed to make that part cohesive, but when reaching Chapter 2 the game opens up a little bit or at least perceives the illusion where instead of completing Puzzles designed once at a time the player then has a choice of which puzzle they would like to do to open a Master Door essentially. This should have that perception that the game is open.
Cinematics
Another thing, that was mentioned was research into cinematics as game are perceived mostly in 3rd Person where there is a lot of reason why 1st person perspective in game don’t feel as compelling and that was something that was a concern, something I didn’t mention whilst there was a talk was incoporting 3rd cutscenes whilst still playing the game in a first person view, which was my elaborate solution to that problem
Narrative
Hope was happy with the story elements, but she said a lot of major backstory elements were missing, but the core concept was there. I know that sounds bad but honestly that was good in regards to that the story could really become fleshed out even with a character that represents the game would help, Hope also mentioned it doesn’t even necesarrily be a human, but with our design, I think creating a human character makes a more compelling story, for that relation.
Prototype
Showing off the prototype was the last thing on the list and it seemed to raise some eyebrows, in a good way of course, where the prototype core function for now was the show off the mechanics which is something both Jarek and Hope picked up on, they said that it was good overall but the trouble that they had with it was the presentation of narrative elements and level designs and even though the concept stood out and made sense, adding these features would just boost the prototypes visaul presentation, even with particle effects being added to really give it that spark.
Reflection
Just like the masters said ‘the idea is ambitious which can hold development down a little’ but they did mention not to force anything that isn’t to be done, just make sure the design is great and that it, which I’m sure it is gonna be good, now just hoping we can pull it off. Next thing I have to focus on, is over developing the level designs so at least we have 1 level to showcase the idea properly.