This week was Quarters. We discussed on the motivation of the project, our design goals and showed the faculty a demo of the prototype that we had worked on. The prototype was heavily based on the idea of movement in a 3D isometric view using a “Thumbstick”. We had discussed this with our client, but we had added a level mechanic based around the idea of travelling through a city based structure while killing enemy robots and not dying.
Generally, the reactions were positive, if a bit more curious. People liked the idea of moving using your thumb and attacking using the other thumb. People questioned whether the genre of the game can be something else other than hack-and-slash. They also suggested we think about how people would be playing our game, and how we would get the viewers more empowered. While most people were aware of Twitch.tv, they were more interested in it when we told them how big this industry is and once we showed them what they were playing on screen, they were more interested.
We had a discussion after the Quarters and discussed about how can we make more sense of this. On Friday we had Quarters sitdowns, where Chris and Scott came to our project room and discussed in-depth about how we can achieve certain interactions with the viewer. Chris was generally happy with the game interaction of the viewers and challenged us to think beyond just voting. We were on the same page as we didn’t want to do something that had already been done. Scott also gave us a lot of good feedback on the game and pushed us to think broad. This was certainly a lot of feedback that we got during this week and it will certainly be beneficial for us to consider most of the points.
While we think this was definitely helpful pushing us in the right direction, but at the same time we felt that it would be better if we can have something more tangible in the hands of the faculty members at Halves. So, for this week we will mostly be focusing on probably the most interesting part of the game, i.e. the interaction with Twitch.tv and how to use that interaction in the game itself. On the art side we will also be making a lot more assets to include in the game at the end of the week.