This week, we all worked asynchronously in the first half and met a few times closer to the due date of the game design document. We had to meet to clarify the details of the functional flow board, which we eventually did on Figma for the convenience and ease of editing. Like last week, my role was to extend the story more and tie it a little closer to the gameplay and objects. Previously, Ikura was a fish roe that got sent into another dimension by a witch. We wanted to keep it cutesy and light-hearted, so we switched the witch to a magical cat that made a blunder on their first time opening dimensions. Ikura's family was unfortunately caught in the middle and sent into it. Since Ikura's family was mentioned, we decided to utilize them as objects to be found. We decided to have Ikura find a sibling at every level, and the finding of the sibling would signal the increase of fidelity. We also thought about how the fidelity increase would work and decided to keep it simple with a colour and shading increase. This also helps to keep the world visually interesting. Ikura lives in a world of magic but Ikura itself can't use it. Maze navigation would require the player to use Ikura's physical strength to move obstacles in the maze around.
While writing the GDD, I also made the narrative flow board (a very simple version) and decided that the majority of the storytelling would occur in cutscenes before and after the primary gameplay mode. This makes it easier for the story to be communicated to the player while also keeping it straightforward for the team to work with. I hope that in the future weeks I will be able to add more complexity and make a more interesting story to experience.