Reflection
Phase 4 is the most specific of all the phases. Prior to this phase, ROOM-9 was only at the concept and idea level, but now it’s time to start thinking about how it can be made? Is the idea realisable?
Whether it’s the structure of the corridors or the challenges within the rooms, or the choice of characters and drawing styles, each choice has to be related to the difficulty and outcome of the production afterwards. It’s not all about adding new content, it’s about keeping what’s important.
By making a basic gameplay demo, I realised that a lot of the ideas only came to light when I actually did the problems. A lot of interesting designs might be confusing or too difficult to make when they would actually work for the player. So when I was constructing the in-room challenges, it took me a bit longer, and I needed to try to standardise the difficulty, and the rules should not be too difficult, and ideally they should all have clear and consistent gameplay and mechanics.
A more sensible way of thinking about judgement is also now established. Compared to a lot of diffuse thinking in the early stages. Now it will be more considerate of the feasibility and wholeness of the idea. It has also made me realise my strengths and limitations to get the basics right. Although the overall content of the current ROOM-9 is still incomplete, the core has been decided, including the game logic, room challenges, characters and visual system.
Presentation
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/room-9-overall-design-concept-powerpoint-e5d4/285182409
This presentation is more of a stage presentation, not a final result, and the content shown in the powerpoint includes both the parts that have been realised and the parts that are still being tweaked, and there are also many parts of this phase that are not mentioned in the powerpoint. For me, the main purpose of this presentation was to help me organise the direction of the whole project and to show me where there were shortcomings.