University Projects: Synapse Week 4

This week has been intriguing, I will post another post tomorrow aswell but I just have to write something about what is happening at the moment.

We had our alpha today and our programmer had stayed up all night to make it work, but 40 minutes or so before we were supposed to show the game, it all crashed. This led to us not actually having anything to show except a combination of old and new elements.

So we decided to have a design meeting combined with a pivot meeting. What can we do with what we have?

The answer to that is that we have pretty much nothing, we have a bunch of fancy animations, 4 of them are completed and 4 more are coming through the pipeline nicely and in a timely manner but we do not have a game to back these animations up.

So during this design meeting we started tossing around ideas and all through this we ended up discussing if we could turn our game into a 2d platformer instead. This 2d platformer would use our current mechanics for level selection.

The problems with this is that we lose the core focus of our game, the latent learning part, we also lose most of the puzzling and our core mechanics would be put into a secondary mechanic that we would use for nothing but the menus or try to get it into the game in some other way.

I personally don’t like this idea as we drop the entire foundry of the original concept. I would prefer if we stuck to the original idea and started working more toward making the game more interesting by including more puzzles or designing more latent learning tools for the game.

To do this we need to discuss the original design more, what more can be done with it, what can we throw at the wall and see if it sticks.

For the rest of the week I have been working on the presentation and the scrum document. Which both will become void if we decide to make a heavy pivot into a platformer. Which isn’t the most enjoyable feeling but if it is the best for the game it is what needs to be done.

Scrum management has been tiring as we made some big design changes monday. That is when we decided to have actual puzzle rooms within the game area. This required some major overhauls in the product backlog, adding the new and removing old design parts from the game.

More over, I’m stuck on the presentation, right now I have to decide which one out of six ideas I want to go with.

The first one is a standard presentation, where a presenter talks over some photoshop slides and communicates the information through this. The problem with this is that our game is about latent learning and I want to include that in the presentation.

The second idea is disguised as a standard presentation, but the slides present different brain parts aswell as the game information. The brain parts presented would be those that correspond with the presentation. The How do you play part is presented within the motoric centrum.

The third idea is a theatrical presentation, with slides, a presenter and actors. The actors act accordingly to the presentation and might perform the tasks being talked about or move around the stage to show of how different brain parts work.

The fourth idea is also disguised as a standard presentation, but includes a ubiquitious game that gives out more information about Synapse to the audience if they find the ubiquitious game. The risk with this is that none in the audience finds the rabbit hole. Rabbit holes are the start of the ubiquitious games, for more information about ubiquitious games, see killer, I love Bees, or A.I.s promotion series.

The Fifth idea I had is silly, but it might work if pulled off correctly, it’s a Treasure hunt presentation, the audience is given clues both through out the presentation and in physical forms such as a letter. When combined this treasure hunt leads the audience to more information about the game. It’s interactive, but the presentation might die due to no one having the energy to do it.

The sixth idea is someone playing the game while the presentation is going, adding some additional scenes to this presenter build. The audience sees the game being played, while someone describes it. This is a good way to present a game, except that it might seem lazy and as if there is nothing concrete to actually talk about.

So that is what I have done this week. Have a long design meeting ahead of me and will likely post here on the results of that meeting tomorrow.

Have a good night from a Van and a Game Designer.