team design journal one by charly
We decided that a game featuring a vacuum as an avatar would be an effective way to combine our three chosen games mechanics. We could get the bendy limb physics from my prototype-01 in the vacuum tubing. We could get Sol’s rocket-jumping/explosion mechanic by blowing air in and out of the vacuum head. Finally we could include Nat's Item combinations by combining properties of items within the vacuum itself.
Originally the idea was for players to be capable of effectively flying by sucking or blowing air out the head of their vacuum which would propel them in a desired direction. After playtesting with my roomates, however, it was clear that mechanically this wasn’t very interesting (you just pointed where you wanted to go) and also didn’t feel very unique or appropriate given the novel vacuum theme. The idea of being able to create a vacuum-seal with surfaces which would act as a prerequisite for movement seemed to garner excitement and so was pursued instead.
After implementing the suction based movement, my roommates' next complaint was that it felt too imprecise to suck objects and move around considering at this point the rotation of the vacuum head could not be controlled directly and was dependent entirely on Unity Physics simulations. To remedy this I allowed players to control the rotation of the vacuum head directly. Importantly to the feel of the game, while sucking I made sure that the head would naturally rotate to be flush with surfaces in order to preserve seals along changing surface normals and maintain suction.
The other important moment in the development of this prototype occured when I went to implement item combos, originally we had planned on having a UI with recently sucked in items similar to that in Nat’s independant prototype. Because it was easier technically to implement physics and collisions based combinations I tried that first. It seemed fairly elegant as it blended in seamlessly with the already physics-based vacuum world of the prototype. It made item combinations less of a mental and physical burden as players didn’t need to learn new buttons, or even make conscious efforts to combine in order for combinations to occur naturally. Unfortunately, it also made deliberately combining (or not combining) two specific items a difficult prospect, making the whole item combining side of the prototype more finicky. Because item combinations now occurs naturally without the player having to consciously do anything, and item combinations were now harder to control consciously, this made power ups and combos more of an afterthought in the prototype.
After that, the rest of development largely took the form of polishing --- adding juice assets.
It became obvious after playtesting that the suction based movement system was not clear from the in game effects/instructions and often had to be communicated to the player. From this experience I realized that in more complicated prototypes instructions need to contain more than just the raw controls and goals --- they must also include the important dynamics found in the game. The wheels on the vacuum proved confusing to a lot of the players as it made them think that they had to be used for movement and that therefore being upright was a prerequisite for movement. A lot of players never realized that you could actually lift yourself up using the suction, this made me realize that the affordances granted by the vacuum theme (you can suck things up, the concept of suction) also had its drawbacks.Normally the suction of a vacuum is never enough to support its own weight, in this way the theme made the dynamics in the game more confusing.
I thought it was interesting listening to what some players enjoyed about the game, in their words it was satisfying to clean things up and rendering a messy place clean and orderly. In this sense the game seems to be scratching a similar itch to casual hidden-object games (Chess, Shira. 2013. The Mystery of the Hidden Gamer: Women, Leisure, and Hidden Object Games). Because of this, I’m really curious as to what demographics would be most interested in the game if it were released, considering its mechanically demanding gameplay but simultaneously casual goals.
If we were to introduce win/fail states and explicit goals to the game, from asking playtesters it seems the most natural solution would be to present players with a room which they would have to clean up all the out of place items (or a percentage of said items) before a timer runs out. I imagine most of the skill expression in a gamemode like this, assuming that skill expression would be of concern in the game's design, would lay in the ability for players to quickly move around the space, and also in the ability for players to plan out efficient routes over multiple playthroughs, potentially routes which involved desirable item combinations.