Week 9 involved making plenty of changes following the weekly team meeting.
During the meeting, we discussed the lack of story and direction for the player - with no narrative reason to keep the fire running and no real reward for doing so. At it's current stage, the game felt dull, this was confirmed following external feedback.
It was decided to add some more narrative in the form of a storyboarded cut scene, as a story would add significantly to the entertainment factor of the game (Isbister, 2017).
After further discussions, we identified that the core survival concept wasn't strong or engaging enough, so it was decided that the environment would need to change to re-emphasise the survival aspect. Snow and ice were chosen, as they seemed the obvious elements to give more encouragement for keeping the fire alive.
The entire tileset as well as detail assets would needed to changed in order to give the illusion of a winter landscape. After revisiting a variety of 16-bit era games, it was clear that most used a blue hue when shading snow and ice to emphasise the cold. I chose similar, but quieter repeatable tones to capture the same effect. Some examples are provided below:
Images 1-5: Snow tiles (Will Ward 2021)
Images 6-8: Snowy rock assets (Will Ward 2021)
Despite these changes, I still felt that the playable area was still too undefined and open still without clear objectives and choices - something was still missing.
In casting a more critical eye was possible to see that the demo lacked real structure or meaningful choices at this point - specifically for tutorial, I think part of this could be traced back to the initial design and the use of emojis and symbols instead of written text or audible instructions.
It's also possible that collectively we had moved away too far from what was the original game loop and diluted the gameplay too much - removing choices and the ability for the player to take real ownership of their actions and removing the player enjoyment (Adams, 2014).
Further discussions within the group were met with partial agreement and it was decided that some last minute changes would be applied if possible (time permitting).
The UI interface and graphics were also redeveloped to combine the both the health and fire timer within the same bar and make it more prominent, as well as adding character portraits for the quest giver - in this case the tribal elder. It was also decided to design the UI on the larger size similar to 8-bit so that the retro theme was really prominent.
Early feedback was generally positive, but felt that the logo was too large.
Image 9: Keep it burning Initial UI idea (Will Ward 2021)
Improvements and alterations were made, which included adding warmer tones to the campfire, reducing the title size so that inventory items could be placed and completing the rockface edging.
Image 10: Keep it burning UI (Will Ward 2021)
The final addition to the improved UI included the addition of a portrait style image with speech bubble of the current quest giver - which for the demo would be the tribal elder:
The tribal elder was designed to look like he was chanting by the fire, so the skin was made darker and light sourcing added. The pixel width was scaled down to 164 pixels due to wanting to keep it pixelated.
Image 11: Tribal Elder portrait (Will Ward 2021)
Moving into week 10, there were two main focuses for the team, the first was each of our own individual tasks that were needed to finish the development and polish the game as much as possible, the second was preparing our modified pitch to be recorded.
Discussions during the team meeting were mostly focused on what would be needed for the pitch and how we would prepare and link up and check on each others slide notes/transcriptions.
The presenting time seemed to weigh heavily on some of the the teams minds, but I felt we would easily have enough material thanks to the feedback given in the practice pitch. Not only that, as the pitch was now being recorded into a video, we should be able to efficiently edit out any unneeded material. I was confident that our new pitch would improve on the original, due to our closer working practices that had been developed since.
As the the demo neared completion, additional in-game assets needed to be developed to ensure that it was as polished as possible.
The need for a crafting tree graphic was identified in an earlier meeting and the suggestion was made that this should be seen from the player avatar's view with the different crafting tree icons displayed as cave style paintings on a slate.
Image 12: Blank slate (Will Ward 2021)
Image 13: Crafting tree slate (Will Ward 2021)
One final player character animation was also needed. The gameplay loop would call for the player to die if the fire was not kept alight, we knew that we wanted to add some humour to this and decided that some kind of 'Loony Toons' style snowman death would work.
As before the basic idle animation was used as a starting point.
Image 14: Caveman freezing animation (Will Ward 2021)
Lastly work was completed on the final two in-game assets. These were a cave entrance, which was needed for the narrative and basic enemy (an agitated goose) to add interest.
The tile was designed to link up with existing two tier rockface tiles.
Image 15: Cave entrance tile (Will Ward 2021)
Image 16: Agitated goose (Will Ward 2021)
References:
Adams, E. (2014). Fundamentals of game design. Berkeley, Ca: New Riders.
Isbister, K. (2017). How games move us : emotion by design. Cambridge, Ma: Mit Press.
FRAY, Andrew. 2021. ‘Week 9: Spry Fox – “Innovate in Your Pants”: Co-Creative Design & Development Practice GDD730 20/21 Part-Time Study Block S3’. [online]. Available at: https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/913/pages/week-9-spry-fox-innovate-in-your-pants?module_item_id=54740 [accessed 23 Jul 2021].
TutsByKai (2019). How to Pixel Snow - PIXEL ART TUTORIAL (Aseprite / Libresprite). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsv1rDFzpvo [Accessed 25 July 2021].
Williams, R. (2009). The animator’s survival kit : expanded edition. London: Faber And Faber.
Poh, Michael. (2013). Evolution of Video Games User Interfaces. [online] Available at: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/video-games-ui-evolution/.
Images:
Image 1: Snow tiles basic (Will Ward 2021)
Image 2: Snow tiles detail 001 (Will Ward 2021)
Image 3: Snow tiles rockface 001 (Will Ward 2021)
Image 4: Snow tiles rockface 004 (Will Ward 2021)
Image 5: Snow tiles detail 002 (Will Ward 2021)
Image 6: Snowy rock asset 001 (Will Ward 2021)
Image 7: Snowy rock asset 002 (Will Ward 2021)
Image 8: Snowy rock asset 003 (Will Ward 2021)
Image 9: Keep it burning Initial UI idea (Will Ward 2021)
Image 10: Keep it burning UI (Will Ward 2021)
Image 11: Tribal Elder portrait (Will Ward 2021)
Image 12: Blank slate (Will Ward 2021)
Image 13: Crafting tree slate (Will Ward 2021)
Image 14: Caveman freezing animation (Will Ward 2021)
Image 15: Cave entrance tile (Will Ward 2021)
Image 16: Agitated goose (Will Ward 2021)