Exteriors Devlog Week 6

Similarly to last week, I spent week 6 helping our art team meet the demand for art assets. Our Sprint meeting was brief and mainly involved a few of us expressing that we hadn’t been given much work to do. Thankfully, I was given far more assets to complete than over reading week, so I got far more work done even if it wasn’t design work.

At this point in the project, it really sunk in that the Gameplay of Exteriors is shaping up to be quite shallow.

Looking at the Game under MDA theory, it has little to no dynamics between the mechanics- however, aesthetically the game is relatively pleasing. However, without strong mechanics and dynamics, the game hinges on its story. Upon reading the script written by our Project Lead (admittedly this should have been a task handed by a Designer(s), which is a consequence of the project being a passion project of the project lead) we noticed it had strayed from many of the previous design decisions that had been discussed.

The game’s shallow design is in part due to the project being a passion project of the Project Lead, and the idea gave the designers not a huge amount to work with in terms of mechanics and dynamics. I suggested making each task an interesting and unique microgame ala Warioware / Mario Party minigames to make them more fun- but with only two programmers this wasn’t very plausible for each task, and each one is simple. Luckily, I think if we fix the issues with the script and implement the story well that will be enough to make the game interesting as a sort of “playable art piece” / social commentary.

The script contained extensive dialogue from a Narrator (something the designers had agreed we would have little of if any), and the comments made by NPCs were directed towards the character rather than her house (disregarding the entire metaphor the game was built around). Many such comments were incredibly uncomfortable to read and could potentially be harmful to people with severe Sexual Harassment / Abuse related trauma.

Talking with the other Designers about this, we decided to talk to the Team about it at the following Sprint meeting.