Posts Tagged ‘vertical slice’

NIMk Sprint day 5

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Our last day of intense work! This consisted of mopping up the details and joining the sections we’d finished from the previous days. It’s still hard to know how it will feel to play, and there will be much tweaking – but at least we have a lot of situations and game play which thread together into a complete path from the start to the end of the game.

Being careful to not give too much away, one of the things I’m looking forward to is a gradual opening up of the game as you progress. It moves from quite a fixed path, and opens up into problems with less rigidly defined solutions. The playtesting will be essential to get a real idea of how well it actually works, and allow us to fine tune/radically change sections.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in script writing | No Comments »

NIMk sprint day 3

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Today we worked on the map and quests situated at the beginning of the game. To prevent spoilers the words are blurred. We continued working with post-its, they are extremely handy during a brainstorm in which everything changes every 2 minutes. The whole map is color coded, blue for locations, green for situation, yellow for actions and pink for inventory (items, coins, etc.). The arrows and dotted lines are mostly there to confuse cause we kept moving notes around.

Zone II on post-its

At 16.00 we presented Naked on Pluto to the crew of NIMk and we were very happy Angela Plohman from BALTAN Laboratories came to join us (we’ll be at BALTAN in October for the next sprint). We discussed the project in its current state, and talked about the steps in development we’ve taken so far, the biggest problems we’ve encountered and the next steps. Explaining these things at this stage of the project was quite a test for us. We’ve been submerged in the game’s logic for 3 days now, and we’re starting to loose our sense of reality ever so slightly…

Tags: , ,
Posted in script writing | 1 Comment »

Games design

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Our design for for Naked on Pluto isn’t (all that) public yet as it’s very much in the sensitive hand wavy might all change our minds stage, but it will be sooner or later. In the meantime, here are two of the games design practises we are trying out.

User centred design

This one I was taught at a design workshop by Ylva Fernaeus, Sara Ljungblad and Mattias Jacobsson from SICS, but I recognise it from elsewhere, and it was good to have it explained in full.

One part of ‘UCD’ (as I’m sure it’s abbreviated to to confuse the initiates) is called user stories. You make up a fictitious person who might play your game, and describe who they are, why they are playing and what their motivations are etc – you can get quite carried away with this, and within sensible margins, it seems to help.

Then you describe the experience of the game from their point of view. This means you can leave out all the details and focus on what you want them to feel – from the inside. (more…)

Tags: , , ,
Posted in script writing | No Comments »