Dev blog week 1

Wednesday 15.11.2023

We chose the verb „hypnotize“ for our game. We are Angelika, Laura, Jan and Stefan. We call our team „Psyche-Phantoms“. During the ideation phase, we had an idea storming session where we first wrote up our own ideas and then pitched them to our team. The main idea is to have a maze where the goal is to escape the maze. The player encounters different hypnotic effects while playing the game. We created a board to gather our ideas, document our decisions and use it also for project management.

Thursday 16.11.2023

We continued to clarify what the idea of our game is and presented it to our class and teachers. The main feedback we got, was that we have to make sure that our „hypno“-effects feel balanced. You can get a better understanding of the „hypno“-effects later on. We had some inputs on Unity, Version Control and Project Management to get started. This has helped our general understanding of Unity. We also had a session which was dedicated on teamwork. This included discussions on what our goals of the project are, who will be taking which roles and how our collaboration should look like. For us, the main goal of the project will be to learn as much as possible. In that sense, we decided to focus on doing lots of knowledge sharing between design/programming. We did not do a fixed role allocation, but we had good discussions on where we see our strengths. Regarding collaboration, we were able to share our expectations and what creates a good atmosphere where we can all work well. To finish it off, we created a small team contract which we will review next week and maybe extend on it.

Friday 17.11.2023

The inputs for Unity continued today. After the inputs, we dedicated our time to figure out a first analog prototype or our level design. This involved a lot of dicussion and decision making. The main decisions were:

• How the verb is incorporated in our game
  • The player gets hypnotized instead of the player using the verb hypnotize as an action.
• General setting
  • We went for a forest theme(for the maze) with mushrooms(which are the elements that add hypnotic elements to the player). This was not much of a discussion as we quickly agreed on it and everyone was satisfied with it. We did not decide on the style of the player yet.
  • Top down view
• Two keys on the keyboard are used.
• The player moves automatically. When approaching a path intersection, the player turns slightly so that he can make a decision. The player has n seconds time to make a decision, otherwise, the game system makes the decision.
• Hypnotic effects
  • We opted for an additive system of effects. Meaning that when encountering a mushroom, the first effect applies, then the second effect and so on. For each mushroom, a positive and a negative effect is applied. The effects have the following order:
    1. Change of color, which is unavoidable, therefore introducing the player to the mushrooms. This effect is permanent
    2. Negative: Increased speed in general and variable speed. Positive: Bigger frame/vision
    3. Negative: Shaking camera. Positive: New paths appear
    4. Negative: Side switching for keys. Positive: Hypnotic mushrooms can be blocked by using both keys at once
    5. Negative: Hallucination(fake mushrooms, fake walls, invisible walls, invisible mushrooms), Positive: Winnable path/item appears(e.g. key)
• We agreed that we want to make the game look more visually fucked up, the more hypnotized you get.

These decisions aren’t final and we will maybe change them later on. Based on these decisions, we were able to create a small prototype with Lego. Below is an impression of the prototype, where the tires are the mushrooms, the figure is the player and the bricks are the walls of the maze.

We also quickly played through it. We did not do any major adjustments after playing it through and agreed to bring this into a digital prototype next week. Here’s a picture of us playing through it: