Week 9

On an amazing good note we passed both stages and our group is overwhelmed with joy at the moment and this has come as a blessing to our group. This week we took back from the hard gritty work and starting coming up with different scenarios for our game and figuring out where we want to go. Overall this has been good for the project we believe. We have currently changed the top down view to closer to Isomeric view. When I look at the new view it shows off a lot more without taking away from using the close up camera if we went first person with this game. We also had time to talk about formation of the followers. We have it where they will wait and follow behind the player as he walks then regroup around the player in the form that we decide to go with. This allows for the player to squeeze in smaller places with the AI more worried about just following as they can and then regrouping to their proper locations when he stops moving. The other way is we want them to stay as close to their formation at all times as possible. This will allow the overall shape to always be just about the same except they will have collision avoidance and go around objects and than move back into their proper position over time while moving with the player.

As we bring these two options to the class we would like to see not specifically what someone wants, but why they feel it will work better with the game or what it brings to the games table. If someone feels that staying in formation will make the player feel limited on where he can move even if he knows they will do avoidance and tends to make him take longer paths and we will lose players from a design perspective we will have to look at that. In the same way though if that is how testers would tend to play with a large group in their formation than we could really go in depth on how we design levels and try and figure out paths players will take with certain size groups. We could use that data to place the opponents who will eventually have followers in locations the player will primarily go when they have a large group.

However with the people always following behind we would like to know how this affects the path choices of the players and testers as well. Would they choose players where they can funnel the people behind them or will the still take places which have a larger area so the followers still tend to have a large amount of space. These questions are what we primarily focused on this week as a whole. We hope to implement both as two prototypes this upcoming week and than run testing sessions on both and see what players receive better.

Finally we have started too look into greater depth on how to give a proper reaction to the player following a questions as well as some balancing issues that have aroused. With our game being so psychologically based as previously stated. We have run into many concerns and questions about how the system works. Right now it is extremely strict to the charts derived from numerous amount of research and spreadsheets that my designer Devon put together and I helped complete the math functions to figure it out. With this it tends to be easier to lose followers than to gain. This is not specifically what we want the game to entitle. The players running around getting a follower than before gaining another the lose the one they have. We know people will leave groups if they don't like whats answered while the groups are smaller. As the group gets larger the group mentality starts to kick in which we will add in. Yet getting a group larger than two or three we have seen has gotten significantly harder since we added the lose people feature. It takes three questions after they have joined before they even think of leaving. Yet it has been taking 1-10 questions to get some people to follow us and we know which 4 numbers they might pick. This has lead to some concerns. Leaving them up to solely what they would pick will make moving forward with this game difficult and we need to find a way to balance the game play and the psychology. This is how we have come to end our week.

Week 8

In our class we got a good amount of positive feedback on our changes and where we wanted to go with the "game". I put quotes around game because right now we have a player interaction with stereotypical people, and that is where the game ends. We needed to start thinking of ways for the player to have to move on from one stage or level to another and what they would need to accomplish in order to move forwards. Something that Professor Mayer said was we were going with masks and bodies. We could require a certain base amount of types of masks, and you would need the minimum to move forward. This would allow players who just want to advance at the minimum to move forward at a specific time, as well as allow players to take more time to try and gain all followers in order to move forward. We also started to play with the difficulty of gaining and losing followers. We are working out how we want to achieve this. We have it based of the psychology, but not hundred percent because it would be too cut and dry and made the game extremely difficult to get a well rounded diverse group.

As this week looks like it is coming to an end we are getting ready to present for both stages one and two. Although we have well developed plans and a presentation we have sat down and gone slide by slide as a group we are still a bit nervous going for both stages. We don't know how often is been done or how well its normally received. Also we have a lot to talk about with both presentations and we need to get it all done in a concise matter. We do believe that we will be able to get both stages which will lift a large burden off of our shoulders and will allow us to breath for a week as we regroup and figure out the overall goal of our game before week 12.
We as a group still have a lot to figure out and with us figuring out our final concept so late and starting with a base and less game mechanics in order to get to this point we have sat down with a hammer and chisel and just been going to town with the game getting as many pieces of art and mechanics that make this prototype we are going to show playable and have had less time developing the overall outcome goal by the end of the semester. We have a lot of dreams at where this game can and we believe will go, but we haven't had time to discuss alternatives to the way we have been going so far.

Week 7

As we moved forward with the game influence we have narrowed what we want influence to become and we started to build a layout of an initial level. My personal job this week was to take into account our Designer Devon's statistics based off of our 24 different archetypes of people we want in our world, and give them proper percents. Whether it be which numbers on the scale they would pick all the way to what percentage of questions correct you needed in order to gain or lose a follower. All of these were based off of a variety of psychology research that the group has been putting together. Overall from the research the four largest factors to determine everything we wanted in the game, without having to create too many archetypes were Sex (M/F), Self-esteem level(High/Low), School(Diversely Educated/Singularly Educated), and Age(Young/Middle/Old). These with the variety of combinations gives us a total of 24 different types of people the player will encounter. Each have similarities and difference based off of which traits will be different.

Now know we were going to have so many different types of people, but the difference could be as simple as just Male or Female we decided to create masks and bodies. Each one of these has slight features that represent a specific selection type. This way a same body with a different mask would just be changing one feature. This allows us to create x bodies and y amounts of masks but we can have each body type with each mask. This allows for less overall created art to have one of each type.

We also decided to keep it top down and started to figure out how we wanted to show off the masks during play time. Due to the mask and body the player would need to see both. We decided to hold off til next week to figure out exactly where we wanted it to go, but we all needed to come up with a plan on what we wanted for the meetings this upcoming weekend.

Week 6

After this most recent presentation our team overall took quite a bashing. With this in mind we still held our head high, but we decided to take a couple steps back and brainstorm some new ideas to see if we just jumped onto a wagon of two games too quickly in an effort to move forward. We also chose to have a lot more group meetings throughout the week and less work outside on our own. This overall went very well we came up with many different concepts that we all wanted to go forward with. Each team member was required to come in with at least one concept and we would vote and than move forward with those two games. Devon and I both had games that moved forward to attempt to get better details, game play and a more developed concept overall. This started going very well, we had a first responder medic game as well as a semi-horror/ thriller game. With this we started to do both paper prototypes and basic movement and levels in Unity. We chose to meet with Professor Ferguson on Monday to go over everything. This meeting brought about a whole new view of our game concepts and allowed us to feel much more comfortable. We went in with two concepts that we liked and came out with a different concept using the thriller game, that we wanted to really push. With the meeting we found out the medic game would have a very large scope and more research than the last 5 weeks would allow for us. The final game we call influence, which is a game that use Likert scales and using them to collect followers.

Our concept is to keep it as abstract as possible we want the player to decide who he is and why he needs followers. This allows every player to take about a different view of our game and make it what they want. Also you will build up a group that will eventually become the new "you" to say as you progress into a larger world looking for more and more followers. This is the same life or size concept as our previous comet game. As your influence grows so do you, but instead of it being you your followers become so attached the group becomes the new you. People who will never leave you no matter what your decision will be. You will go through and face other people with groups and be asked more specific questions that are one side or the other and no in between which will dictate a stronger push and pull than the rest. Overall we feel a lot more confident and ready to attempt stage one again next week. Depending on how far we get we might go for stage one and two and a week.