Weeks 5-7 Second Demo and strategic definition

Weeks 5 and 7 flew by, and we released a second demo on Itch, received feedback from users, and kept working on fixing bugs, enhancing user experience, improving software architecture, and adding new features. Anyone is welcome to play and leave their feedback as well.

Everything that we have accomplished so far has been a combination of highly technical skills, collaboration, and strategic co-creation. And I would like to highlight some of the main learnings.

🧪 User testing and workload awareness

The user testing yielded promising results, but perhaps, in this instance, we had good feedback on bugs we already knew would present problems.

Nonetheless, creating a second demo helped us better gauge what we were capable of achieving within two weeks. We could have pulled an all-nighter to develop more levels and features, but that wouldn’t have been smart or realistic, considering that this isn’t the only project we have ongoing.

🧑🏻‍🔬 Make it work first, then re-structure

Once we learned what worked and what did not with Demos 1 and 2, we agreed to start from scratch and re-think the architecture. It was beneficial to consider scalability—not because of game maintenance or technical debt, but because it would give all developers more freedom to develop features in a more stable and thorough environment.

I supported this task, but Nicolas undertook the heavy lifting of implementing the singletons for the main managers.

🧚‍♀️ Storyline co-creation session

Like what tends to happen in traditional UX/UI and product development, people always have differing perspectives on the project. This became even more evident when discussing the details of the game’s back story. So, we went back to the whiteboard to provide more details about what happened with the character digging into his backstory. Our main goal was to give an answer to the question:

How could we introduce the story in a compelling but efficient way?

What are the main aspects of the backstory we should convey?

How might we show those aspects of the story in the game? (not worrying too much about implementation)

What could be our minimal viable story features? (implementation-wise)

We had 2 co-creation sessions of 3 hours each, for a total of 6 hours to ideate, discuss, and agree on a solid story and feasible gameplay and demo. In the end, we agreed on a specific storyline for the ideal version of the game and the demo. Now, we all know how the game starts and ends.

🛠️ Gray box prototyping

Once we had a general concept of the level layout from start to end, I undertook the responsibility of implementing a playable gray box prototype of the entire game without any mechanics. That helped me create a list of all the assets that needed to be created and a specific list of tasks so the team could pick from a poll of ToDos.

Lastly, working in consulting has taught me that strategic decision-making and conceptualization are team efforts that require time. In game design and development, the multitude of decisions extends beyond gameplay mechanics, and being able to gauge how much time it would take to collaboratively create strategic definitions is a valuable skill. In this project, I have encouraged my team members to conduct several co-creation sessions to define the key strategic cornerstones (storyline, gameplay loop, main mechanics, game main goal). I can gladly say that this has yielded effective results.

Next steps:

1. Implementing the intro sequence.
2. Implement the mechanics from Demo 2 into Demo 3.
3. Define a consistent visual identity for the UI and general look and feel.
4. Filling up the Game Design Document