Week 2.
To gain knowledge of game design, I keep reading the book The Art of Game Design, it encourages me to think of myself as a better game designer even I am still starting. In addition, I found GDC talks are quite helpful. I watched a handful of GDCs. For example:
Crafting A Tiny Open World: A Short Hike Postmortem
1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality
Level Design Workshop: Designing Radically Non-Linear Single Player Levels
I learned a lot from these talks.
As a gameplay designer and UX designer, I plan to design the blocks and mechanisms and make them more cohesive. Specifically, to make a stronger connection between the mechanics we have such as fidelity change, the reward of getting an item, and fog of war. so I need to design it in a way that is possible to procedure generate, which parts are random and which are not. I looked back at the background stories. I felt it was incomplete especially for not linking mechanisms together. In other words, those settings do not make sense and the objectives are meaningless.
So, I redesigned the background story: Magic exists and is common. Our main character IKURA is being looked down on by their family members since Ikura is born without magic, unlike the others. Ikura does not have magic but a much bigger body. One day a magic cat is learning magic by the river but messed up. The Ikura family are sucked into a different dimension, another side of the dimension. In that dimension, the magic is barely usable, so Ikura becomes the one who can save their family from the collapsing dimension. Ikura uses tools to help their exploration. Their families are trapped because they usually use magic but they cannot use it here. After being saved, the siblings apologize for belittling Ikura and teach Ikura a skill(?). Ikura is appreciated and becomes happier than Ikura can see the world with more fidelity and colours.
We are told in the first presentation that we don't have a reason for players to play the rooms. I think now we have.