A new journey

Some things have changed since the last blog post. About a week ago I started a temporary 3 months position as a game designer in a smaller company. As such a lot of my focus and energy has been diverted towards that.

With regards to my own projects this means that both the board game and the 3D platformer collectathon will progress at a slower pace during that.

For the board game I am heavily considering prototyping up a version that involves drawing cards, and potentially giving the player multiple choices of actions to pick from via this. I keep having a hunch that this might be a better fit for the idea, but there is only one way to find out.

For the digital game, I am carrying a notebook with me everywhere I go and trying to get into the habit of writing down every little single snippet of idea I have. As I decided I wanted to create this project in Unreal Engine, getting the current position is actually extra beneficial for me as their game project  is currently being worked on in that engine and I am trying to both get used to the engine and learn as much about it as I can to then be able to start prototyping up mechanics that I’ve already noted down. 

With regards to the job position, to describe some of the stuff I’ve been doing for the one and half week I’ve been there so far, during the first week I sat down with the team and we went through and updated 5 design pillars with 3 player experience goal descriptions for each. We will be using those 15 descriptions to evaluate both current ideas, mechanics and features, as well as any future ones, to make sure that we stay within scope for the feel and gameplay the team hopes to achieve. I am now in the process of trying to create an initial and very rough version of the main level of the game in which we can implement the most core of the mechanics and features to enable the team to move into a very early testing phase with players to help us analyse what works and maybe doesn’t work gameplay wise at this point.

I am very much looking forward to where the journey with this team takes me and their project and the next update might have more focus on my process within that than on my own projects, depending on how those progress. I will still be trying to stick to the initial blog schedule I set for myself when I began writing these, and keep posting at least once per month.