Over the past month my team and I have prototypes 3 different concepts. The first was a puzzle game called cognitive cop where the takes control of a detective diving in to victims minds in order to catch a serial killer. The player could rotate parts of the environment like rubix cube and had to collect clues to reveal the killer's identity. The second was a stealth action game called Corrupted Heavens. In it the player controlled a shadow after being sucked into a hellish world based on Japanese folk lore. The player could posses enemies by standing in their shadow and had to use them to murder all of the gods that had become corrupted. The final prototype was called A Twist of Fate. It was a grid based strategy game where the player controlled units based off of Tarot cards and could inverse them to change their play style.
Now we need to decide which prototype we want to go forward with. However before that major decision is made I want to take some time to reflect on the last month. To do so I will be answering several focus questions in the form of this blog. These questions are not only designed to reflect on the quality of each project but also how I myself have been preforming and advancing. This reflection is designed to define what is interesting about each prototype and what I can do as team member to improve my performance.
Which prototype was the most successful as a product? Why?
As a viable product Corrupted Heavens had the most potential. It has a easily defined core mechanic and an interesting ascetic. It was easily marketable and was unique in its genre due to the possession mechanic. Twist of Fate and Tarot are more complex making it harder to explain what made them engaging experiences.
Which prototype do you feel had the best process and execution?
Cognitive cop had the best execution by far. While it was far from perfect we were able to produce a playable prototype that effectively showed off our core game play loop. Corrupted Heavens and Twist of Fate suffered from miss communication and external setbacks. Because of this neither of their prototypes were able to show off the core game play loop. In addition on both projects it felt like the team didn't have a firm vision on the project. Core details were changed late into development on both because of communication issues.
How were you able to use your skills effectively over the last three weeks?
Because of the immense amount of designers on the team me and one other designer were served as programmers for the project. While I have programing experience in the past my main strengths have always been as a designer. Unfortunately because of the team composition I have been able to do little to no design work. In addition even my programming work has not been utilized correctly. Most if not all of the work I have been doing on the prototypes has been work that I have done prior. Despite this my work has been turning out poorly due to the small amount of time I've actually had to do the work. The dead line for each prototype was Tuesday but most of the time the concept was not fully decided on until Thursday or Friday before due to creative disagreements. I am not able to work on most weekends so that gives me only one or two full days to complete all my work.
What did you learn from conceiving the three different concepts and executing their respective prototypes that you can apply to future projects?
The main thing that set back the previous games was the large amount of time put into the pre work planning. We spent large amounts of time over thinking concepts and working on problems that could never have been solved without testing. This drastically cut in to the amount of time we had to do work. In the future we need to spend less time focusing on low level details and begin iterating as soon as possible to allow for more time to do more complete work.
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