Connected Games DEVLOG 2 (Feb 9 - Feb 22)

Completing the First Draft

Each of the designers went off and wrote up first drafts of aspects of the game. I designed puzzles, tasks, menu systems, help systems, random events, the in between round shop, player character summary, distraction design, game progression, and HUD. In my last blog I detailed the player character summary, distraction design, and the shop design.

I designed 5 puzzles for the game. These would be optional for the players to do in order to get more chaos and points. They'd be able to spend their points at the shop in between rounds. I really wanted to highlight co-op elements with these puzzles, and my favorite is the shed puzzle. How I envision it there would be a cat who enters through the roof of the shed and a cat who enters through the door. The cat who entered through the door will have to navigate a maze while the cat on top will have to move planks of wood to allow the cat below to make their way through. The mole hole puzzle is similar, except the cat below is blind and the cat above has to guide them with sound.

We did decide that we are shifting our gameplay to focus more on chaos then co-op however, so a lot of these puzzles will have to change. They won't be puzzles anymore, but opportunities for chaos instead. Similarly, there will be tasks added that are focused around inconveniencing other players as real life cats aren't always known for working together. The tasks currently include tracking mud into the house, knocking over and breaking dishes, stealing and hiding valuables, and making hairballs.

Here is a visualization of the game progression. I imagine it as a pretty cyclical progression with the game getting more difficult as it continues. It goes from round to treehouse, only broken by a game loss state. Our game would be one that could keep going on forever as long as the players can continue to reach a win state. Within the round, there is a loop of doing tasks, maintaining hunger, avoiding enemies, and helping friends.

This is a visualization of how our menu systems would work. As of right now, it's just a flow chart of what option will lead you there. This is to help the programmers understand what options we'll need and how they interact with each other.

For help systems, we'll need to test the game more to see where people get stuck before we can really define them. For now, I'd say the game doesn't have a mandatory tutorial. I think the menu will have a list of the tasks and how to do them for players who are stuck. As for HUD, the list of tasks each player will have will be able to be viewed when players press a key. The HUD will display the player's hunger, stamina, and inventory. There will also be a reticle to show where the player is looking and things will be highlighted when the player is looking at something and can interact with them.

For random events, I imagine them being round effecting events that have a chance of happening in the later rounds. For example, there could be a Thunderstorm event that makes the power go out and the thunder makes all the players jump. There could be an infestation event where there are rats everywhere but they're eating the food so you have to deal with them at the same time.

Next Steps

We are working on our presentation to show what we are making. As I mentioned, we are shifting our game slightly so a lot of the things I talked about in this blog will be subject to tweaking to make them more based around chaos. In the next week we'll be making those changes and putting together our presentation. Going forward we're also using project sprints to organize and get things done quickly, so we have lists of tasks for people to claim.