Designer Blog 2 - The Warfront From Intercepts

Hey Everyone,

Sprint 2 has been completed and we are making progress on this game. During this sprint, we created our first electronic prototype focused on the message feature of our game. If you want to know more about what our team has been up to, check out Natalie Hoffmann’s Producer Blog. 

The first thing I worked on was a bit more scoping up. Now that we have started development, I have an idea of how long it takes for our devs to make things. I wanted to add a few more things to ensure we had work for at least a couple more sprints. Some of the smaller things I added were models for props and vehicles to add more details and expand on features like terrains. The 2 bigger features I added were a mechanic where the AT Machine can break. Once broken, the player has to fix it to keep using it. This mechanic kinda cements how I want the 2 mechanics in the analysis room to work: These are mechanics that take advantage of a player’s limited attention. The player’s attention will likely be on the messages trying to discern which are true and which are false. The AT Machine and the Chemical Station can reveal more information in a message, but they have different important timings that may distract the player like the chemicals ruining messages. The other big mechanic that I implemented was a Side Mission Mechanic. This is a mechanic that gives a player missions to do for a bonus. These missions will take resources away from the player but have rewards the player might want. These missions can go from taking a specific territory for more units for the next day to attacking early to get a boost in battle. These are missions for the player to consider whether or not they are worth the resources to complete. Overall, I’m still not sure if I have scoped up enough, but my producer believes that we will be fine for now, so I’m going to trust her.

One thing that was revealed to me is that I was pretty unprepared for the art side of things. When planning this game during the summer, I mostly focused on the systems of this game, so when it came to art, I just thought “Make it low poly and realistic like Metal Gear Solid 1” and gave a couple of reference images. So when one of the artists asked about the color pallet for units, I had nothing and had to make them. I learned 2 things from this. 1) As a game designer, I have to be better prepared with information for all aspects of the game. 2) If I need help, I can ask devs who have more knowledge than I do in their fields. When making the color pallets, I asked one of the artists’s opinions about my color choices to figure out what would look good and what wouldn’t. Art isn’t one of my strong suits, but now that I am the lead designer, I need to give my team as much as they need to understand my vision.

The majority of this sprint for me was taken up with making message templates. Message templates are needed to generate messages by replacing keywords based on how the enemies were generated. These were fairly simple to make since they were short to make sure the player didn’t get bored reading. For now, 1 of these templates included as much information the player would want from the messages as they needed. However, a future plan is to make the difficulty increase as players capture more territory, and one of these ways is to decrease the amount of information in these messages. I got a lot of these templates done while having a little fun with some world-building in these.

The last thing I did was prepare for the playtest of the first electronic prototype. For this prototype, we planned to focus on how players will like the messages and the war room. However, due to some miscommunications, we had to rush the prototype which led us to cut the war room from the prototype. As unfortunate as it is, we had to learn from our mistakes and keep moving forward, so I geared the feedback form to getting player’s opinions on the messages and the concept of the game. To make sure this doesn’t happen again, the leads and devs are communicating a lot more. Despite having a rough prototype, we planned on getting as much feedback as we could in Sprint 3.

Sprint 2 has shown me more of what is needed from me as the lead designer. From planning to information, I have to be able to communicate with my team constantly to ensure things go smoothly. Failing to do so has terrible consequences. As I write this in the middle of the 3rd sprint, the feedback from the playtest is… expected, but still leaves me hopeful that if we can learn from our mistakes, we can make a great game.

Until Next Time,
Justin Lam
Game Designer