In the early morning of Monday I set off to Southampton to present my chosen game idea, Pusher, and my prototype at the John Hansard gallery to both the class and some music students.
I also included a video of some gameplay, mainly showing off the movement mechanic as well as the music.
Feedback
After giving the presentation I was also given the following feedback on the game by tutors:
“The visual and audio direction is strong and suggests a lot of potential for a great flow
state.”
This was reassuring to hear as I was worried that the visuals would look barebones due to the retro, vector inspired style, and that flow state was what I intended.
“The current gameplay loop feels a bit at odds with itself. E.g., ‘move slow and
collecting followers’ doesn’t seem to synergize with ‘move quickly and escape’ — if
players do one of these well, it seems to hurt the other option, which could lead to
players just focusing on one dynamic or the other—or else feeling frustrated moving
between them.”
This was also something I was very worried about myself as I started to think more deeply about the mechanics and tried to iterate upon them in my prototypes. Ideally the player should feel compelled to not stick in one state or the other for two long, so I have some potential ideas as to how to fix this:
- Crowds of ravers should be attracted to the player when they get near, not passively spawn when they are moving slow. This sets up a dynamic of wanting to take the risk to move erratically when possible not only to avoid enemies but to try and find more crowds to attract.
- However, as a limitation from permanently moving the burst mode will still be limited or require “cooling down”.
- Another way I was thinking of naturally recreating the experience of listening to live music and the build-up/tension combined with short, energetic high points was to make the player need a certain crowd size to engage burst mode, but this would need to be experimented with during prototyping or development.
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