Hi, Adam here, your cohort mentor. If there's anything extra you'd like me to review, or anything you want to talk about regarding the project, just let me know on Discord.
- Playability
You’ve succeeded in producing a short playable demo with a narrow slice of gameplay, demonstrating a single background asset, a character asset, a branching dialogue point, and a reaction minigame to steady the boat. There’s also a fully functional menu. This is roughly what I suggested aiming for during my ideation feedback, and for the scale of the project this is a reasonable point for the prototype to be at, and a good starting point for the production week. Great work!
- Promising Idea
A short visual novel about protecting something precious while travelling is a good formula, here situated in the middle of climate catastrophe with clear stakes and dangers. As I said in my ideation feedback, I think your game has a clear identity that shined through in your design document, and has interesting things to say within the narrative (“natural systems adapt… if we let them”, “it takes a village to combat [climate change]”). I think the framing of travelling through Florida should help give the location character, and will let you highlight the diverse ways climate change will affect areas and ecosystems, as well as the diverse ways communities might respond.
For branching dialogue options, remember that players will have multiple reasons to make decisions beyond the one you specify, and that specifying can feel constraining sometimes. It might be better just having options more akin to “Okay [follow him]”/”No [leave]”. This is especially good if you properly pre-empt the decision by saying a few of the ideas the character might have (“can I trust him? Can I help the community by helping him?” etc), so the player can mull over the questions but not feel like picking an option is forcing them to have a single simple answer.
- Use of themes
As suggested above, I think your design document shows a game rooted firmly in the themes of the jam, and that the narrative framing will allow you to focus at once on the specific issue of bees but also more broadly on flooding and the man-made changes to global climate which endanger the bees and everything beyond.
In this prototype, we don’t see much of this. The mention of mangroves and egrets are nice nods to how the natural world is responding to the events, but they’re set pieces not plot. It’s not immediately clear, perhaps because the prototype ends before we learn more of his character, how Florida Man enriches the subject and links back to the theme. He’s a potentially promising character for how communities interact with issues they may not understand (perhaps because of far-right propaganda/conspiracy theories which are inextricably tied to the fossil fuel giants that fund their mouthpieces), but this has yet to be realised.
I think you’ve got some good ideas, but need to make sure to keep the aims and CTA in mind as you write to keep the plot tightly on the environmental themes.
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, Call to Action
Your previously stated CTA was in two parts. I think the first (“raise awareness of the impact of human development”) will be easily achievable, though is not present in this prototype. Thought will need to be put into how you articulate and emphasise the second (“take personal responsibility”), since “personal responsibility” is very vague, and not actionable for the player unless specified. Is ‘personal responsibility’ small individualistic behavioural shifts which will only have negligible impacts in preventing the type of disaster your game features, or is ‘personal responsibility’ actively building solidarity and fighting against the industries that will make that future come about, focusing on climate justice and trying to get involved in initiatives to protect our world? The former is admirable but near meaningless at this stage of climate destruction, even in countries like the US where individuals are the most wasteful, while the latter is a very hard sell to those unengaged, and will require you to be very explicit in demonstrating what climate justice does/doesn’t look like as well as modelling behaviours of engaging with it.
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, Reasonable Scope
The reasonable-ness of the scope will now depend largely on the confidence and speed of your writing. The minimum art assets required are small and achievable, with room to expand at the end of the sprint if you have time, but the entire story will need to be written and implemented within the next two weeks, which will contain multiple locations, multiple new characters, and potential branching paths (though many such branches can feed back into other branches to look large to the player but still be manageable). If you want any feedback on progress or any specific elements/writing at any point just message me.
- Well Planned Production
There’s no production plan in the documents submitted for ideation or prototype.