During week 3, we learnt about various topics surrounding core game design while we experimented further with our own game concepts – notably the idea of “essential experience” in a game and how it can influence design direction.
The essential experience can be defined as “the core feeling, thought, or behaviour you want your player to experience”. Some examples given to us:
- “I want the gameplay experience to revolve around a curiosity and intrigue in discovering what’s going on in the other world and solving the mystery.”
- “To have the feeling of overcoming demons from an unbalanced environment.”
- “Dead on Arrival is intended to make the player thoughtfully consider certain aspects of life.”
To explore this further, we looked towards Desta: The Memories Between (developed by South London studio UsTwo) as a case study.
- Design Intention: exploring reconciliation through dreams.
- Essential Experience: emotional repair and reflection.
- Core Emotion: connection and forgiveness.
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We then did some group activities to further explore concepts between us, and share what we already had with each other. In particularly there was a lot of discussion around the core emotions we wanted to explore with our game: funnily enough all of us (myself, Maria, Erik, Derry) wanted to explore more negative emotions in our ideas.
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On Thursday, we had our first round of pitch presentations in front of the class. I was actually first to present – I had worked myself up quite a lot about presenting in front of everyone, but when I was actually up there doing it things went relatively smoothly, or at least moreso than I had imagined. Below are my slides that I used for the presentation.
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