Newsletter for Project Heidegger Week 4 in PDF format

Week Overview

Level design precepts were our foremost concern this week, as Wednesday brought with it another visceral (and viscerally instructive) meeting with Blade. As the week drew to a close, we divided into two equally potent splinter groups to best address the charges of the coming week: one team is focusing on level design, and the other on the creation of our Quarters presentation.

Martin, overwhelmed by birthday cupcakes.

In Detail

On Monday we held a meeting in which we each shared five pre-prepared design goals for our custom Dead Space 3 level, as Blade had, last week, requested the creation of such a list for him to appraise and pare based on what’s possible and not possible for him to (most generously) implement on our behalf. Our design list was based on our team co-op experiences with Dead Space 3 and Army of Two: The 30th Day (as we don’t yet have access to The Devil’s Cartel); analysis from outlets of video game analysis and criticism such as Gamasutra and Kill Screen; and assumptions based on player psychology information synthesized from The Bartle Test, as well as key emotions and the Four Keys to Fun defined in the research of Nicole Lazzaro. Martin thoughtfully condensed these Heidegger-guiding principles into a preliminary metrics-gathering spreadsheet within which the gameplay particulars of the Dead Space and Army of Two could be measured against the desires of specific player types to aid in our hypothesizing about the potential connections between the games: this document, and future revisions of it, will prove instrumental in our iteration process, as with it we can better refine our level to collect the precise player data we seek. During our meeting, Blade further sharpened our expectations of what manner of level we’ll have agency to design (one very closely based on an existing segment of Dead Space 3) and what mechanics and assets we can modulate and modify to assist in our data-hunt. As a testament to Blade’s charity, after our substantial meeting at the end of a doubtlessly hectic day for him, he drew on the room’s whiteboard, from memory, detailed user-interface schematics of the level design toolsets he’s used in response to an off-topic question about his job posed by Vera. We’re all greatly appreciative of his time and vital contribution to our project.

Next Week

The first half of the week will be almost-exclusively devoted to preparation for our Quarters presentation on Wednesday, but we plan to have a draft of our level ready to share with Blade by next Friday.