Concept interpretation, lighting and finding the fun
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One of the main unique selling points in the original concept document is that the player character is blind and has to shoot a sonar wave projectile in order to navigate the environment. The group thought the game pitch sounded very interesting and fun to make, but personally I was very skeptical. Being presented a pitch black environment and the having to shoot projectiles in order to see anything sounded like something that while it could be neat at first, the novelty of it would wear off really quickly. Also basing the game in a pitch black environment would also make the game look quite boring/uninteresting visually. However I wasn’t able to get my concerns about the game concept across to the team members, and gave in. Maybe we would be able figure something out. It took us a while for us to get up and running in Unity, and then a while longer to get an implementation of the sonar wave mechanic. But sometime around the middle of the second sprint we had it implemented. And yep, now everyone was on board with the fact that it’s not a particularly interesting nor fun mechanic. 
Current interpretation of the game concept that we have decided to scrap and redesign. While I know that we are allowed to deviate from the original concept document, the “it’s a dark environment”-part one big reason for it standing out among the other game concepts. If we were to abandon the blindness/darkness part, I feel that we get rid of a rather core part of the game. So right now we are still trying to keep that part of the design, but change it so it’s not a pitch black environment/you are not reliant on shooting a projectile to see around you. So the alpha version we have now is acting like a proof to us as a group that the original game pitch is not the game we want to make. It has been quite worrying since feature freeze is coming up rather soon and we don’t have a game we feel great about yet. And up until this yesterday we haven’t had a clue on how to fix it/what to replace it with. The new game design idea that we will be working towards for the following weeks is that instead of the player flying around shooting projectiles to provide lighting in the environment, it’s creatures and organisms that provide it. That way we can also do something more interesting with the projectile shooting that the player is doing.  |