Week 3 is a short week. Due to the severe weather, we were working from home on Wednesday and Thursday. Though we didn’t have time to discuss as a team about what puzzles will be in the adventure game, we still managed to do some research by ourselves at home.
Conversation System Prototype
After the two prototypes we made last week, we decided to continue on the conversation system. This week, we worked on the backend of the conversation system so that the prototype can read a simple JSON file and present the whole interactive conversation tree on the screen.
Game to Engine Approach
As we are talking with our client this week, he mentioned that we can’t only think about the technology, the engine. It might have some blind points. In addition to our engine-to-game approach, he recommended us to do it from game to engine, which is to think about what are the puzzles the user can make in the adventure game and what are the requirements for those puzzles. With that in mind, we can then derive the engine features from those puzzle requirements. We found that there was truly a missing story from the puzzle designers’ perspective so during the weekend, we, as a team, walked through the puzzles that can be included in our game and how can they be constructed. We compiled a list of puzzles, story-telling techniques and win/lose conditions based on that, and we are ready for the quarter’s walkaround!
Also, during our research, we found several external references were super useful: