Week 5: Brainstorming Round 2 and creating a digital prototype for Virus vs. Cells

This week, we’ve been focused on beginning to develop our digital prototype of the Virus vs. Cells concept, as well as determining which of the other paper prototypes we can move forward/build upon.

The Work This Week

Virus vs. Cells Prototype

Wenyu and Tracy began formal development of our Virus vs. Cells digital prototype this week, implementing a rudimentary splitting and merging function, as well as creating a soft body model for our player models. Liangzheng is also working to create a rudimentary level design for the prototype that fits within the theme of the game and also works well with the platforming aspect of the concept.

Brainstorming: Round 2

However, while progress on our digital prototype was smooth sailing, it was a bit more difficult for us to figure out how we could move forward with our paper prototypes. From our playtests both this week and last week, we determined that our paper prototypes were all games that were built essentially for “local multiplayer” or at least small groups, and the distinction between their conceptions of State Share and just a regular multiplayer setup were either non-existent or at least unclear. Virus vs. Cells, meanwhile, seemed to still leverage State Share in a more effective way, using it as a means for the player population within a given game state to exponentially expand (or go “viral,” if you will) at a moment’s notice.

Additionally, Erin also sent us some internal documents regarding concepts the Stadia team themselves were thinking about when they considered creating games that centralized State Share as a mechanic. As we are under NDA, we unfortunately cannot share these concepts here on the blog (sorry!), but they were definitely helpful in our own ideation process.

Based off of our own internal review of these documents and the revelations from our playtests, we then came up with the following concepts:

• The Painter and the Painted
  • On a giant canvas, one player is responsible for drawing objects in the world while another player represents a character who lives inside the canvas
  • The Painter can “spawn” in new players (aka share the state) by painting them into the world
• “One Hour One Life” with State Share
  • Using the model of Jason Rohrer’s multiplayer game (see here) by marrying it to the State Share feature
• One player controls the camera, another controls actions

Client Meeting

We updated our client this week on both the progress on our Virus vs. Cell digital prototype, but also told her about the new prototype concepts we had generated in the fallout of our previous paper prototypes. Of all the concepts we pitched, she seemed most interested in a game formatted around the “One Hour One Life” model, as that seemed to be an interesting utilization of the State Share feature.

From talking with Erin, we also determined that State Share was really good at doing the following:

1. Multiplayer with some form of asymmetric power dynamics
2. Persistent/Shared World
3. Multiplying states rather than replicating them

Erin also encouraged us to think of the game as having 2 distinct phases. In Phase 1, the game might have a max of 4 players, so the early stage of the gameplay might be a lot smaller and intimate. But for Phase 2, we would then use State Share to amplify the gameplay from Phase 1 and exponentially increase the number of players accessing the state, going from 1-4 people to hundreds or possibly thousands. What would that transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 look like?

After our client meeting, we got together to discuss more about how we could take what we learned about our previous prototypes and mesh them with the “One Hour One Life” model. While we didn’t come up with any conclusive concept, it did spearhead some brainstorming that we will wrap up early next week.

The Plan for Next Week

For next week, we plan on iterating the design of our Virus vs. Cells prototype further (namely, make it so that the splitting mechanic better apes the State Share feature via a splitscreen concept), as well as both deciding on and developing out our second prototype based off of the “One Hour One Life” model.