After having gone through a very rapid de-scoping process, we started on trying to build a very simple MVP. We need a single loop of gameplay so we started by thinking about what the current core of our experience is. We all agreed that molding the fluid was a really fun part of the experience. We also loved seeing the creatures come to life and felt like that was an exciting moment of our experience. So, the game loop that we planned out focused on interacting with one character and creating one new one.
There was some important development catch-up to complete in order to allow for this. The poke interaction, which is the one we wanted to test our game loop with, wasn’t working quite as expected. The development team managed to update it so that it used the same tech as our characters did for soft body physics: VertExmotion. The more that we are able to streamline how we simulate the jelly-like effect on our characters, the better.
The focus of our AI refocused from looking at how the slime characters would interact with each other and shifted to be focused on how that characters interact with the player. This meant giving them expressions that change throughout the game and having them turn towards the player during interactions.
We also began adding game management. This included variables that determined how of the characters needed interaction, how frequently you can create new characters as well as the overall state of the world. The state of the world became very important to the game as it will be the aspect that communicates progress in the game. The “happier” the world is, the better the the player is doing; the happiness factor is established by bright colors, lighting and environmental assets as well as playground assets.
A big hurdle for us last week was integration because many discounted pieces of the experience had to come together in one scene. This was mostly completed by Wednesday. This allowed us Thursday and Friday to debug the problems that had cropped up during integration and begin considering what a tutorial phase would look like.
Friday was heavily focused on playtesting options for the tutorial. We were hoping to have a very graceful and minimal method of communicating the gestures that a player needs to learn. We tried a number of options with nieve classmates and discovered that they were pretty lost. With limited time, we decided on more explicit versions of our instruction.