Exteriors Devlog Week 1

We began the first week discussing ideas for games. The two prevalent ideas were…

• A raunchy ‘Conker’s Bad Fur Day’-esque side scroller beat up up starring a detective bear

• A story-based game metaphorically depicting the female experience

   After some time to think, we took a vote on which idea we wanted to pursue in greater depth. A majority of us agreed that the first idea would give us difficulties due to our lack of clear and united vision for the idea, and the raunchy humour would likely come off as more childish than anything else- so by majority vote we decided to pursue the second idea.

   ‘Exteriors’ (our current name for the project) is about a Woman who is constantly cleaning the outside of her house. Periodically, vaguely-made-out figures will walk past and make demeaning comments about the state of her house’s exterior, and how “the inside must be just as filthy” (which is not the case- at the start of the game the inside is pristine). As time goes on and more of these comments are made the inside of the house will gradually become messier and messier, which the player can do nothing to mitigate. 

   The game ends when a figure instead asks about what’s inside the house and the otherwise greyscale colouring of the Game is filled with colour, and the inside of the house made pristine again.

   The exterior is a metaphor initially conceptualised by our Female Project Lead about how Women are often judged purely based on their outward appearance. 

  After this, the Design Team began work creating the GDD and Audio and Art asset lists. Additionally, we decided to create a group ‘Miro’ board as we feel it helps us organise information in a visually pleasing and easy-to-navigate manner. 

   The Miro board involves information such as core mechanics with control schemes, schedules and tasks for each in-game day, and a listing of the mechanics needed for each of these tasks. 

   In hindsight, more effort should have been put into establishing Agile Frameworks into our development at this stage. As an Agile, iterative development process would have allowed us to test earlier and more frequently as well as being a safer and more practical software development structure. And while Agile techniques were used in development, an iterative process wasn’t taken until later on. This meant that we were rushing a lot nearer the end of development.

   Furthermore, in retrospect I think we should have spent the first week coming up with ideas rather than settling on one straight away. Not only would this have given Designers a chance to have their first lecture and learn about MDA Theory going into the project, but it would have avoided many issues later down the line, such as the lack of meaningful gameplay Mechanics and Dynamics in the context of MDA theory.