The end of the semester has arrived and Vinyl is pretty much still in Prototype. It's come a long way since the industry panel and we've changed a TON about the game, but we're not anywhere close to Alpha. We're going to be working over the summer, starting completely fresh, to get the game up and running. We've already set up our first sprint and we've assigned tasks, although only myself, Cody, and Sherly are programming. The three others are unable to work on the game immediately for various reasons.
I'll admit to not being overly pleased about this whole setup, not for myself, but for the other engineers. If they're unable to contribute much over the summer, they're going to come back to a game they haven't worked on or contributed much to and that doesn't seem terribly fair to them. Of course, we're kind of forced into this at the same time since we have to have an alpha version of the game working by the start of next semester. i just really hope everyone is able to contribute in a way that they're happy with by the end of the summer. I personally am implementing the obstacles the player deals with since I'm familiar with that code as well as working with Sherly to generate the mesh of the pipe (as opposed to using a pre-made one like we did in the prototype.) I'm particularly interested in this last task as it's been something I've wanted to work on since the start of the project and because it relates to code I've worked on previously (making a 3D reconstruction from data points.)
Aside from all of this, I'm also not terribly thrilled with the direction the game has moved in since the industry panel. I'm not saying the game should have been locked where we had it, and I fully support changing and modifying the game, but I feel we're moving in the wrong direction. A large reason for this, I feel, was our nebulous design and lack of a solid, defining razor for the game. Because of this, stuff starting being cut or added to the game and it was hard to tell if it fit or not since everyone had a different idea of what the game was. For me, Vinyl is all about the integration of game and music and NOT a game that just has music thrown into it. Because of this, the heavy sports game genre influence that emerged really didn't feel right. Parts of it, such as changing movement to be momentum based as opposed to simply moving work very well, but others, such as grinding just feel tacked on. With the removal of a score mechanic the game completely lost its game feel and entered the realm of "not a game". I also felt we were losing a really awesome aspect of our game, that of the online leader-boards which double as a fantastic way of getting word of the game out in addition to providing people a way to compete. If there's one thing people online like to do it's beat other faceless people on the internet.
I started to become more alarmed once SSX was introduced. I understand and support looking at other games and seeing how they do things, but directly yanking remixing the song while grinding, a completely unique feature to SSX, is going too far in my opinion. The questions I keep asking myself is at what point does Vinyl stop being Vinyl and become SSX in the groove of a record? Why do I want to play Vinyl instead of SSX? We have to be careful to not be too heavily influenced by what's already been done and actually make this OUR game. I'm not too concerned about this, but I think it's very important to keep in mind. I'm still not entirely sold on grinding, but I also don't expect the rest of the group to conform to my design ideals. I also feel it can work well in the game, we just need a good reason for it to be there, and it needs to be related to the music.
Finally, I feel we're starting to disregard a lot of the feedback we got from the industry panel. I think the biggest thing about our game that got a lot of really positive feedback was how we make the song sound like crap if you play poorly. No other game does that and it's our USP. Now, as the one who's spent the most time working with filters to make the song sound more awesome I fully support that, but I also think we need to keep the negative aspects and if anything have more of them. Now that we've learned about splines in Engineering we can ensure there's always a "safe" path the player can take so it's possible to reach the end of the song without a section forcing you to mess up the song.
In the last week we've worked to solidify the design of the game and have Mike as the Lead Designer so that we have a more streamlined design as opposed to everyone just throwing stuff into the pot. Everyone is still going to be contributing, of course, but at least there's a filter now. I keep pressing how much we need a razor and I think we'll have one soon which should really help us.
No comments:
Post a Comment