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.