This week we gave our halves presentation, began designing our customization and economy systems, added procedurally generated problems, and began work on new robot characters.
Halves
We presented our current progress to the ETC faculty on Monday. While we are still waiting to receive their feedback, we have the student feedback provided above.
Mechanics
We began designing our concepts for customization and economy.
Our goals with these systems are as follows:
Economy
- Prevent “guess and check” method of problem-solving
- Give players a meaningful reward
- Track progress and mastery
- Purchase customization elements.
Customization
- Creativity and personalization
- Meaningful engagement
- Keep players interested in playing
- Without a long interruption of gameplay loop
Using these goals we created a system where players earn coins from completing levels without too many instances of “guess and check”. Using these coins, players can purchase “loot boxes” that contain the robot parts players can select to customize their robot. A storyboard of this can be found below.
Robots
As we want our robots to be interesting and distinct, we came up with thirteen personalities to design around for the robots. Each robot will have distinct art, animations, and VO to match their personality. The first robot pictured below is cold, and constantly shivering. The second is very sick, sad, and tired.
Challenges
Moving forward onto next week we have a lot of content to implement before we begin playtesting again. Next Friday and Saturday we have playtests planned. Before then, we plan on implementing as many new robots as we can, along with the completed Addition mechanic for regrouping.
Next Week
Next week we plan on completing the following tasks:
- Finishing Addition Mechanics
- Art and Animation for the majority of the thirteen robots
- Implementing sound
- Putting everything together in preparation of playtests on Friday and Saturday