Studio Mononoke has come to our p3_beta. We continued to get extremely valuable feedback from our peers and the instructors about our game play. The biggest issue that plagued most players was the lack of interesting decisions. We needed to add more tension to the game. This led us to many potential different routes including: adding more building mechanics, adding a different tension (chicken’s health), and map changes. This time around we only made map changes to better guide the player and increase the interest of exploring, but we are still testing and working on the other potential mechanics. In addition to trying to make the game more interesting, we lacked juice so we added some improved theming to our game.
This includes…
- Camera changes when moving through pipes
- Day/Night Cycles - will be explored more in the future
- Sound Effects
- Changing weather
- Show when pipe is connected to lake (particle effect)
- Less time based tutorial
- Controls on the screen
We still need to work on the objective of the game and why this chicken is building pipes. In addition for the next iteration everyone has many different ideas for how to improve the game. We are all trying our own ideas to create interesting decisions that include possibly changing the map to be a more dungeon style map and less open, adding more houses to tend to, managing different resources, and adding enemies. There are many different options in terms of expanding our game and we would like to have a clear idea after this week. Excited for this week's playtest and our analytics!
Until next time,
Studio Mononoke
We wanted to continue to deepen the mechanics of the game play and add more “juice” to enhance the experience of our game. This included…
- Allowing for more exploration of our map and improved map
- Rotating objects while holding them
- Adding weather (yay rain!)
- Adding a pipe transportation component (super cool, super fast)
We also added some more polish with a dedicated tutorial scene and start menu page.
For the next iteration of the game we would like to explore the idea of a more exploration based game, where the player could interact further with the environment. This could include being able to use resources to plant or build other objects besides pipes. Potentially adding parsec which we were unable to get working reliably in this version, to allow for a cooperative experience. Additionally, we wanted to add a more compelling narrative to why a duck would be building on an island. We hope to also add some audio in this next iteration. Hope to hear further feedback in the next playtest!
Until next time,
Studio Mononoke
