Dev Blog week 5: Tech System Design

Dev Blog Week 5

Technical System Design

Building a polished core of the game has always been our goal from the start of the semester since the project will be potentially published in the future. We want to have a robust system which is structural and extendable that we could hand over to our client. Besides, they could add new features to the game even after our project ends. In order to achieve that, we reviewed our original design of the code and reorganized the modules.

The previous prototype are made for the proof of concept. Most of the code are tree-structured and the content are hard-coded in the script. Also, it’s using The Skill Flow Builder, which we have decided to stop the development on the platform and switch to Python from this week. We’ve discussed about the reason of switching in the week 4 blog. Therefore, it’s a great timing to start designing a new system from now.

Design Iteration

We had so much amazing feedback from the quarter open house and faculties in Pittsburgh. There are several interesting questions that we may or may not think about before. Some of them are already under our consideration, and some of them brought up a different perspective for our project. We were thankful for all of them, and we believe we could be more clear about our project after rethinking the answers to those questions.

“Will this be a first-person experience only or will other characters be introduced?”

We’re planning to add friends to our Sim. So they could perform some “Social” activities related to the original game. But using voice to achieve this is challenging. Besides, our Sim doesn’t talk the real language. So we are still iterating the design in this part.

“Will you always dictate the actions? Does your Sim have any free will? “

Yes. We feel like if there’s only one-way interaction, it would be boring. So we are testing different interactions between the player and Alexa to make it more fun. At the same time, we have to consider the limitation of the Alexa platform.

“What is the overall goal of the project? How will you know if you are successful? How long do expect your experience to be? Like a Tamagotchi, will your Sims die if neglected?”

We would like our game to let the player come back every day or several days and take care of their Sim. Alexa users can explore The Sims world and existing The Sims player can discover fun from our game. According to our client, this would be a long-term experience and it doesn’t necessarily have to end. In The Sims, they have a lot of ways to handle death using some humor. We haven’t made our decision whether we want to inherit those features yet. But we will figure it out.

“What is Alexa’s role? Is she another character? Can she interfere with your choices? Do you need to deal with Alexa having wants and needs of her own? Or is she just a narrator? This could be very interesting…would love to see Alexa more involved….maybe after a while, it becomes clear that you are not completely in charge or your Sim….that maybe Alexa has different ideas and you need to find a way to placate/negotiate with her….just a thought”

This is a very interesting point! It would be interesting if Alexa has his/her ideas. However, the development flow of Alexa is typically rule-based that every situation has to be hard-coded in the database. This is one of the issues that we are currently working on – how to let the player not feel like it’s a “decision tree structure” or a “linear” game. Since we would like our Sim to have some personality and interact with their player. So currently Alexa is only a narrator, but we are also considering using voice-over from our Sim to express their needs/free will to the player. So it’s kind of in the same direction of addressing this problem.