CGD: Week 6 and 7 Recap
Our team got a lot of useful feedback when we presented our project in class, so we’ve been focusing on some specific areas to develop them further. Most importantly, we’ve been trying to improve the Dragon puppet gameplay experience, as that could (and should!) be the most fun part of the game. The puppet is possessed to be evil and their one goal is to mess up the hard work of the Sun God followers - and there are so many ways to be a menace.
For now, the team agreed on three unique abilities for the puppet:
the ability to make a puzzle inaccessible to other players for a short amount of time so they can’t collect the offering from that particular chest
the ability to add a puzzle on top of an existing one to slow followers down as they try to collect the offering
the ability to confuse other players by cursing them and changing their movement controls.
There were many more ideas thrown out during brainstorming, but being conscious of time constraints, we decided on keeping the special abilities list short.
After that, we decided to add a special ability to the followers as well, to balance the game and ensure we were not making it impossible for the followers to win - just a bit challenging. And so, followers gained the ability to travel through hidden paths, i.e. use portals to travel around the map more quickly. We still need to fine-tune the cooldown times on all the special abilities we added, but overall I think we’ve got a solid base down.
To make sure our project wasn’t getting too unwieldly and mostly just to document everything we decided to add in a visual medium, I went back to my product designer roots and created a flowchart in Figma.
I have to say, I love a good flowchart - when you strip away all the UI and focus solely on how one action leads to another, it is very easy to spot areas that need more exploration, or even ones that are entirely missing!
I started simple, with leading the player to the Main menu, where they can play around with Settings (what Settings? Well, that’s TBD) or go on to join the Lobby. They can choose to start a single game or a marathon of all 8-10 levels, and can start once all four players have joined. From there, they should see a short introduction of the story and jump into play!
Once the game starts, we start the timer that will signal the end of the game once the set number of minutes for the level has elapsed. We also assign the role of Dragon puppet randomly to one of the players, whose HUD changes to include his special abilities.
At the same time, we have actions that all players can perform: hide, grab and steal relics from others, or deposit them at the altar.
The Sun God followers see their own special ability, Secret path, or go on to inspect and solve puzzles.
When the time runs out, we check the number of offerings left on the altar: 7 and over is a win for the Sun God followers, and anything less is a win for the possessed Dragon puppet.
The successful team is awarded a win, and either sent back to the lobby or into the next level if in marathon mode.
While there will definitely be changes to this flow as we progress, it will really help to have a visual to refer to whenever we discuss our game’s design.
