Design Process
Conception
Iterations
Our team was comprised of people who enjoyed playing tactical games. We wanted to create a puzzle experience, but in a 3D environment as a challenge to ourselves.
Development started with white board playtesting. Due to COVID-19, we were limited to doing so strictly from remote, which brought a lot of difficulties in communicating exact ideas when ideating.
Our initial design was rather complex, with many physics and time based components.
We decided to not dwell too long on the secondary mechanics that were more complex and focused first on getting a solid character controller complete. With this as a foundation, we found we could easily prototype and playtest ideas going forward, alleviating a lot of the stress in communicating ideas.
Immediately after grayboxing the primary mechanics, we realized that our secondary mechanics (time control, recording movements, environment physics) were too complex to convey the type of gameplay we had initially thought of. Cutting these components out of our game allowed us to move forward faster.
Takeaways
Our sponsor, Ubisoft, had challenged us to incorporate a strong social mechanic into our pre-existing game idea. This forced us to expand the breadth of our game.
Our response to this challenge was to let players curate and express themselves with slight game alterations. Secondary objectives and robot customization options could be shared as a package via 4-letter codes.
These additions did simplify many of the level puzzles to avoid over-scoping, but ultimately made our game more dynamic and compelling.
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