Newsletter for Project Heidegger Week 3 in PDF format

Pre-meeting

The foundation of this week was a critical meeting with Rich, Ben, and Blade, a level designer from Visceral Games. The first half of the week was, once again, meeting-suffuse, and we spent the majority of our project-devoted time solidifying and finalizing our preliminary approach to the type of data we hope to collect from our custom Dead Space level (such as gamer types, behavioral analysis, and general telemetry) and the methods by which we intend to collect this data (extensive player testing, primarily, through which we’ll gather gameplay data, ask our testers to complete surveys, and record the demeanor of our testers as they play). We also formulated a list of tentative project milestones divided into two-week intervals, including estimates for when we should have formed a solid hypothesis, completed our level design, constructed our Origin module-facsimile, and begun playtesting.

Isaac Clarke, left, unofficial eight member of team Heidegger.

Day of Meeting

We received, during our meeting, confirmation from Rich that we should proceed in our delineated direction, and we also received a good amount of useful feedback. Blade suggested, for example, that we push level design concerns up in our schedule, as he currently has a lull in his own and will be able to confer with us with greater frequency over the next week; in a subsequent sub-meeting, Blade also informed us of what is and what isn’t possible regarding our Dead Space level, and stressed that we should modify an existing slice of Dead Space 3 rather than requesting all-new puzzles, assets, and environments, as they’d be fundamentally impossible for him to execute in the time that we’re here (or within his professional constraints). Rich’s commentary was focused almost exclusively on playtesting and data collection issues, and emphasized that we should (and that it’s feasible to) target specific gamers for our purposes. Ben urged that we define the player-type spectrums that we wish to incorporate in our study as quickly as possible, and that we should begin reaching out to potential playtesters within a week or two. Again, the responses we received were fantastically helpful, and we’re now all the more enthusiastic about our tasks.

Alpha and Bravo, our spiritual advisors.

Post-meeting and plans

We’ve since been gradually co-oping through Dead Space 3 and Army of Two: The 30th Day in pairs (which has been an amusing challenge due to the limited amount of hardware at our disposal), comparing and contrasting the multiplayer experiences in each game, and forensically attempting to determine their design philosophies: we’ve a follow-up meeting with Blade on Wednesday, in which we’ll detail our custom-level design wants and data assumptions, and in which he’ll, by his own admission, shatter our dreams by instructing us what’s humanly possible for him to implement and for us to acquire. Sanctioned project construction will at last commence next week, and we look forward to the impending routine of mercurial investigation and iteration!