On Monday, we had a guest speaker Sarah Cole, System & Interaction Designer. She talked about different types of games and the ways narrative can progress in them. Also, how limiting it is to create different sorts of games.
Narrative design
Video games – extremely variable flexibility, depends on tech and narrative design, game has limited control of player reactions + timing.
Board games – inflexible, players must self-regulate, rules can‘t easily accommodate different player experience or capabilities. (You have no idea how clever they are. It’s going to be difficult to write a rule set that will accommodate those different capabilities.)
Table Top Role-Playing Games – inherently flexible, GM can modify & tailor narrative experience, distilled narrative design, death of the author (an author writes something, they have an intent, they have an idea of the expected experience. When the author is dead, you can’t ask they what they mean, you do what you think it means or should happen. (Things like DnD. The players can do anything within reason, react in whatever way they please).)
On Tuesday, we had a chance to discuss everything that has happened over the last few weeks and what things went good/bad. After we received advice from the teachers, I have also made a more clear list of the tasks for everyone and separated them for each role.
We have decided that every weekly discussion should have every teammate’s personal development paragraph at the end of it, so I asked everyone to send me their short explanations, preferably with photo and video evidences of their work. It is very tricky, trying to figure out how it would be best to separate our work on one website, so I have settled on creating blog posts for each week, where I would summarise our group discussions/meetings and add personal contributions below. At this point, I realised that the role of project manager was slowly falling into my hands, and that organisation specifics and directories would have to be managed by me.
On Thursday, we had more time to plan things out and also I continued working on the script for the game’s second playtest. The highlighted part is what would be included in the playtest during week 8. I wanted to make Mabel to sound a little mischievous and bratty, because that’s just the way she is. Jace is a very nervous person, while Beatrice seems to be caring only about her hoop…
During the first playtest, we used placeholders for the illustration at the start of the game, but once Cici started working on them, I have added some more guidance for her on the storyboard. On Thursday, I have also drawn the storyboard for the second playtest. Due to the fact that we had to alter the story a little, I had to cut down on the locations as well, so the statue with the hoop for Beatrice stands at the square next to the dance hall.
When Cici shared the finished main menu, I gave her some feedback on the positioning of things. For some reason, it was really not looking like any of the sketches that I drew and the ones that were provided by Scarlett. At this point, I started questioning if everything that we discussed during meetings and lectures was considered when other teammates did their work. I have also provided a written down feedback for easier understanding.
Before Thursday, I have experimented with dialogue boxes and fonts. As Jess has done so much work with characters’ expressions, we have decided to actually put them in the dialogue box (like in Undertale). For colours, I have colour picked the palettes Scarlett provided on her website. I have also found fonts that resembled Scarlett’s custom ones. I did the same colour picking for the transition illustration and added some brighter colours for contrast.
The website where I have found the fonts: https://www.dafont.com/search.php?q=handwriting&page=12
