So, along with an initial post, I've gone about creating a basic article component for my portfolio. Initially our team was under the impression that a single development blog would cover all of the content, but since individual development blogs are required, I figured that this would be a great opportunity to build my own blog system within my site. The resulting visual only took a few hours starting from virtually no planning, so it should work a bit smoother in comparison to linking an external blog. Furthermore, this should also allow me to easily extend images, videos, and more content within each article.
But, enough of that, I'll tune this in time and further improve the structure. Our first week was largely based around brainstorming. We attempted several sessions to just discuss ideas, and often we just focused on noticeable design choices in games. Eventually we narrowed down ideas while considering the areas on interest of individuals on the team. As most of the team was interested in some sense of exploration, and since Sam wanted to further investigate his own pitch, we decided to start by looking at some mechanics relating to a Planetary Exploration Experience.
I took a while to adjust some of the details in order to better fit the semester and necessity for immersive gameplay. At first we keyed in on just the research mechanic, the ability to examine creatures and plants in order to acquire feedback and information on the environment. However, this alone probably wouldn't hold the player interest, so we thought more on the process of relating it to the rest of the gameplay.
From there we grasped a concept of utilizing researching to provide the player with knowledge and evolved abilities over their gameplay duration. The experience would encourage the player, a scientist, to explore a foreign environment, collect information, and advance their abilities and control pieces. We wanted to create a replayable simulation with a sense of mastery tied to its core features. Subconsciously mapping the environment, taking note of dangers and their solutions, would provide the player with gameplay that would engage more than just their ability to time button presses.
However, we wanted to stray from the idea of surviving, as well as being absolutely stranded. While not fully discussed, toward the end of the iteration we brought up an idea about a mission-based system. Each session of gameplay would represent the scientist's active job-day, and throughout a set amount of time they would be offered missions, or contracts. These, while mostly optional, would provide motivations to explore, collect, or witness certain events and scenarios with a score / pay reward to follow. This would help steer the game toward its casual roots, while still leaving intact a sense of purpose and freedom.
As far as programming goes, as noted by the in-depth analysis of brainstorming, there was not much to tackle until we had begun to narrow down our ideas. Nonetheless, I began creating a base project that will eventually serve as the play-field for further testing. So far I've implemented by own first-person character, jumping, forces, and double-jumping. While many of the features are somewhat simple to rapidly prototype, I've taken extra time to isolate certain aspects in order to further improvement the smoothness of the control scheme.
For instance, when jumping, the player loses some of their movement velocity while aerial. This conveys a certain necessity to remain floored for maximum speed, while jumping still offers enough variance to allow the player to adjust their location during the fall. Furthermore, the double-jump works in a much more intuitive way, when compared to just applying another upwards force. The double-jump is not as strong as the initial force, and if the player is moving in a horizontal direction before the jump, the magnitude is transferred to the horizontal direction held during the jump. This means that if the player is moving forward, and then double-jumps backwards, they will begin to move backwards at the same speed. This allows for swift directional changes while aerial.