To all our caring readers,
We are back in action with new blog posts coming out weekly now! We sincerely apologize for our absence and are happy to have you back following along with our development. We have gone through a lot of changes since we last posted; a member graduated then moved to a new state, we lost a sound designer, we gained a new music composer and we now have a dedicated art team! Over the summer and fall we changed/pivoted our design into something that is simpler and more cohesive than we have ever had before. (I will explain more about that in a bit!) Welcome back and welcome to anyone reading for the first time! We hope to provide a few helpful anecdotal stories from our development and release cycle specifically tailored to those making VR games for the HTC Vive.
So quick synopsis time...
We fumbled a bit with our summer development. Hindsight is always 20/20 but we were hungry and ambitious to make the biggest game we could as our goal. Our daily and weekly communication did not happen at the rate it should have so the design doc for us became a way to pile on new designs. This lead to a fracturing of understanding the core design for our game. One way that we discovered toward the end of the summer to fix the issue was to have a design document culling every 2 weeks where we evaluate the designs laid out and old designs to make sure that everything is staying cohesive with our design principles. Moving into the fall we sat our goal as prototyping as many mechanics as we could to try to find the ones that stuck the best with our established designs. This got us mixed results. On the positive side, we tested A LOT. We gathered a respectable amount of playtesting data that provided a good update to our design principles about how to treat players in VR.
On the negative side of prototyping rapidly we came to a breaking point where pivots were being pitched multiple times a week, and even a day. Now I understand that every development cycle has a "lost in the dark woods phase" and ours was dark. We had to scrap a 3 month long AI project that was simply too ambitious to get done before our launch. And we had to go back and find what made our game fun and unique. A good technique we used was to evaluate if our unique selling points were still what made our game stand out and if they represented our games core still. One other technique we utilized was breaking down our games core into a two word statement called a unifying vision. Then analyzing every single mechanic/system in the game to see if it still served that statement. Doing this also got everyone back on board into agreeing on a singular concept for the game at it's highest level. Below is a brief snippet of our discussion notes from our unifying vision meeting:
Now to address the actual game changes we made...
Elevator Pitch:
Batteries Included is a Virtual Reality action game where players manipulate the environment and shoot down enemies to help hordes of goblins ransack the castle!
General Design Principles:
Player attention is the main focus; player has many tasks to do all at once that require short amounts of attention and they must prioritize which to get to first
Hex-based terrain; player manipulates a few hexes in order to fill gaps in the map and better shoot enemies and drawbridges
Everything needs to be interactable; Drawers can be opened, toys picked up, lamps turned on, all to promote VR interactivity and immersion
All menu items/interface must be native and physical to the environment
USPs:
A reverse on tower defense
Shrink down for first person action or do top down environmental interaction
Unique VR interactions
Theme:
Toy-focused, kids room play-area similar to Andy’s room from Toy-Story; inspires nostalgia in players from a time when they were kids, is intended to immediately set tone.
Story:
Fight as the Toy Master, summon goblins, trolls, and other toys to your side, and begin your assault on the castle.
To wrap up here, I wanted to say thanks again to everyone that has read our previous posts and encourage people to read through all our old posts to see how much a game can change even in just a 2 year development cycle. We will continue posting new pictures as well on our twitter account so give us a follow @ShadowShrimpDev and again, thanks!
-Devin Good, Lead Designer Shadow Shrimp Studio
So quick synopsis time...
We fumbled a bit with our summer development. Hindsight is always 20/20 but we were hungry and ambitious to make the biggest game we could as our goal. Our daily and weekly communication did not happen at the rate it should have so the design doc for us became a way to pile on new designs. This lead to a fracturing of understanding the core design for our game. One way that we discovered toward the end of the summer to fix the issue was to have a design document culling every 2 weeks where we evaluate the designs laid out and old designs to make sure that everything is staying cohesive with our design principles. Moving into the fall we sat our goal as prototyping as many mechanics as we could to try to find the ones that stuck the best with our established designs. This got us mixed results. On the positive side, we tested A LOT. We gathered a respectable amount of playtesting data that provided a good update to our design principles about how to treat players in VR.
- VR players will act like toddlers. They will try to open, break, and throw everything. And if they can't do any of those three things, they will get upset. Much like a toddler.
- It is hard to "show" players how to do things in VR. But, incorporating native visuals and audio queues are your best friend. If a player needs to do something, throw it on a poster. They will see it, and try it.
- Players really only focus on the touch pad and trigger controls. Most people have never used the other controls on a Vive so keep it simple.
On the negative side of prototyping rapidly we came to a breaking point where pivots were being pitched multiple times a week, and even a day. Now I understand that every development cycle has a "lost in the dark woods phase" and ours was dark. We had to scrap a 3 month long AI project that was simply too ambitious to get done before our launch. And we had to go back and find what made our game fun and unique. A good technique we used was to evaluate if our unique selling points were still what made our game stand out and if they represented our games core still. One other technique we utilized was breaking down our games core into a two word statement called a unifying vision. Then analyzing every single mechanic/system in the game to see if it still served that statement. Doing this also got everyone back on board into agreeing on a singular concept for the game at it's highest level. Below is a brief snippet of our discussion notes from our unifying vision meeting:
Now to address the actual game changes we made...
Elevator Pitch:
Batteries Included is a Virtual Reality action game where players manipulate the environment and shoot down enemies to help hordes of goblins ransack the castle!
General Design Principles:
Player attention is the main focus; player has many tasks to do all at once that require short amounts of attention and they must prioritize which to get to first
Hex-based terrain; player manipulates a few hexes in order to fill gaps in the map and better shoot enemies and drawbridges
Everything needs to be interactable; Drawers can be opened, toys picked up, lamps turned on, all to promote VR interactivity and immersion
All menu items/interface must be native and physical to the environment
USPs:
A reverse on tower defense
Shrink down for first person action or do top down environmental interaction
Unique VR interactions
Theme:
Toy-focused, kids room play-area similar to Andy’s room from Toy-Story; inspires nostalgia in players from a time when they were kids, is intended to immediately set tone.
Story:
Fight as the Toy Master, summon goblins, trolls, and other toys to your side, and begin your assault on the castle.
-Devin Good, Lead Designer Shadow Shrimp Studio
Comments
Post a Comment