Week 04

This week we got plenty of feedback from ETC faculty and began playtesting with naive guests. On Monday

Early in the week, we took our Week 04 build to a Playtest Night. Our first player (apparently) had no experience with PC games. “Does The Sims count?” James asked. This was an interesting question because even though the famous game may not have “hardcore” attached to it, it is a game. Players may not be given explicit goals, but they definitely make up their own. Promotions, relationships, and skill trees are all player-driven mechanics, which got the team thinking. If survivors were a fun aspect of the game, would the ability to micromanage their daily lives be as interesting as sending them out to collect resources for their survival?

Our second playtester mostly had lots of experience with board games, strictly strategy games like Settlers of Catan. Davis honed in on the resource-management system of the game but felt torn when he was presented with the lose-condition of running out of food. Since survivors are a resource too, wouldn’t losing food waterfall into losing survivors first, rather than a lose-condition? It was a great point that segued perfectly into Quarters. The survivors were a fun part of our game, and they seemed to be the main resource of the game.

During the Quarters meetings, faculty members latched onto the emotionally engaging survivors in the game. Because each survivor has a name (Victoria, Shawn, Bryan, etc.), the faculty felt connected to the small figures slowly walking across the vast, open terrain. A final note encouraged us to think outside the box of realtime strategy games, and target a higher level “strategic decision making” goal for the game. We agreed, we met as a team to discuss the future development of these topics, and we called Quarters a successful showing of our progress to the ETC faculty.

Two important discussions happened this week: how much work would have to go into each survivor’s programmatic system, and the final art decisions needed for the moving shelter that these survivors live in. The images below are a result of being able to save some of the game screen’s real estate for the player to see the environment around the entire moving fortress, rather than blocking out the top of the screen with a tall structure. The result is a unique structure that also looks more “Rube Goldberg”, fitting our theme of survival better.

To round out the week, we added a notification system with generic missions and more visible immediate feedback as the player is running out of resources as well as the groundwork for the aforementioned character manager in the codebase. Our artists completed a first pass of the new survivor character model and UV layouts for the refinery section of the moving shelter.