Weeks 8 and 9

Forgive the doubling up of posts… these past two weeks have been kind of hectic.  Monday of week 9 was Halves, so week 8 was spent getting everything together for it.  Now that we had a direction the whole team was excited about, we needed to work quickly to put something together to show for Halves.  We got to work putting together a demo that would show off our main mechanics: swiping to create wind, blowing a leaf around to clean pollution, and finding trees to restore health.  We also decided to use “pollution monsters” as enemies, since we didn’t want to demonize any particular technology or industry, and we used the gesture system from one of our earlier prototypes as a way to fight the monsters.

Within a week, we managed to have a fairly complete prototype, with all our planned features in place as well as basic menus, instructions, and level progression.  It’s a fairly simple demo, with just two tutorial levels designed to introduce our mechanics, but the responses so far have been fairly positive.  We ran an impromptu playtest over the weekend, and found that people really enjoyed playing with our mechanic, even though parts of the game were apparently confusing.

At Halves, we showed a live demo of our game, which looked something like this:

Since then, we’ve been working to address the complaints we had from our playtests, making the gameplay more intuitive and giving the player stronger feedback about their actions.  The next item on our agenda is working out exactly how gameplay will evolve, and how the game will remain interesting over multiple playthroughs.  We’ve also begun once again diving into the lottery elements, and hope to have those implemented within the coming weeks.