#001 - IT HAS BEGUN

As some of you might know, me and John have been doing this for a while. In fact, our one year anniversary has come and went, but it was today that I can say that we may have an actual game on our hands... I mean on paper.

Here's what I mean.

I had an idea recently, and I wouldn't call it a particularly novel idea, but it came out of desperation. Hurricane Ian was just off the coast of Cuba and I started asking myself questions like, oh my god, what are we going to do if we lose electricity. I'm going to be bored! And if I'm bored, I'll have to admit to my kids that I get bored too and apologize for all those times I ridiculed them for being bored.

During this existential crisis, I came up with the aforementioned idea. What if I design my levels on paper, and then extract my game design ideas from sessions I run on a custom table top rule-set with beta testers.

It took about two days to design a vertical slice. A single floor in a hospital. The idea is that your nearby village sent you to break into this long abandoned hospital and repair the generator there so they can resume communication with nearby settlements.

I ran the campaign in person with someone who had a lot of experience in tabletop campaigns, and as we did this, the player came up with ideas of what they would do in the game, mainly by playing it like dnd, and because of those decisions, I was able to extract design stories that helped me design systems in the video game.

For instance, one player decided to use their hand to drain a bathtub, another decided to use their club to knock the drain open, so I added a feature to allow items to be used in interactions with objects and in dialog.

The more experienced video game players clicked with this gameplay saying that everything flowed very nicely. Commenting that the pacing created tension.

And even though almost all players died in the same encounter, none of them died the same way, and they seems to walk away giving compliments. Two key ones were, "that was super tense" and "surprisingly fun." I collect these quotes in a document that I will use for analyzing qualitatively the results of these tests. I have several more lined up, and so far, the results have been interesting.

One the flip side, John has managed to take the model I sent him and some of my basic designs, get the model moving around in game, implement a static camera system, tank controls, and cursors for the head and weapon to follow.

A lot of progress in just one short month. Things are finally starting to go right for us :)