Posted October 09, 2023 by Stewart Wyatt
Taking the research that I had done on wealth inequality from my last Dev Log and turning it into a pitch was a slightly difficult prospect as a lot of my research focused on the more human-centric elements of the issue. This led me to thinking about how games could reflect a person's story, and the contrasts between them. GTAV and Octopath Traveler both have multiple protagonists with distinct personalities, and are story-driven games. To that end I thought that I could use the same sort of concept with my pitch. Admittedly to try and mimic either of those games would be massively over-scope, and to that end I decided I was going to focus on the characters themselves and represent what they do through minigames. These games would be one of the main indicators of how difficult their jobs were against how much they were getting paid, and the inequality would quickly catch up with players as they began to be unable to afford basic luxuries and then even some essential goods.
Putting all that into a pitch however was rather difficult to explain properly, and so I focused on the main sticking points of it's comparison to smaller games like Papers, Please and the minigames in something out of the Yakuza series. Making sure those were presented carefully, and ensuring that the project maintained it's roots in showing the wealth inequality between people were the most important things to me.
My team was formed mostly randomly but I value the chance to get to work with new people and see how we all work to bring this thing together. My goal is to keep ahead of the production work so that the rest of the group can come to me with any other needs that I might be able to aid with, and I can help bring the finished product together into a grand piece by the end of it.