For this project, we wanted to keep the mechanics minimal and well-designed. There were two bastions of development for this: Maive's world, and the world within the book, which I will discuss separately.
Experimentation and development in this area will be documented by Sid, however as a small team we all are involved in the considering and design of the game. I will document my contributions to these things in this blog.
Maive's World
The technical aspects of Maive's world were spring-boarding off of what we had already developed for Upside Island.
Camera angle:
As a group we discussed which camera angles we might like to use, and looked to pre-existing games with similar themes or genres to inform us of how we might successfully go about this.
Tunic (to be released) employs an isometric camera angle to give a wide view of the surroundings. This is relevant to this game as it has combat, and boxing the player into a narrow view with a poorly placed camera would make engaging with enemies frustrating. However, for the purposes of our game, I think this camera is a little bit too distance and far-removed from Maive. The player needs to be up close and personal with our titular character, so they can feel connected and close to her and her development.
Fe (2018) has a classic camera style that follows the main character fairly closely from behind. The camera is dynamic, pulling out and pushing in for emphasis at certain points of the games narrative. This scripted camera is really appealing and feels deliberate, but can sometimes feel a bit disconnected from the main character as they can only be viewed from behind.
A Short Hike (2019) finds a middle ground between these two camera types, with a camera that SLERPs between different points on the map seamlessly, and sits slightly above, but close to the character. Of all the cameras we have looked at, this is the one the group likes the best, although it still feels a little distant from the character.
NPC Interaction:
We are interested in creating a well-developed world for Maive to inhabit, with NPCs to talk to aside from the narrative's three main characters in the three beats of the game. We want to keep interaction with these NPCs simple, however, with fixed dialogue exchanges that reveal information about the world/character, but do not have an impact on the narrative. This type of interaction is showcased in games like A Short Hike and Night In The Woods (2017), simple, character centric and light-hearted. The dialogue development is documented in my narrative design blog.
Collection:
As per the narrative, Maive collects berries on her journey home. They act as a proximity affordance to the end of the game, with berries appearing more frequently the closer you get to her destination. We thought this narrative note could be a fun opportunity to input collectibles in the game, and will encourage the player to explore their surroundings in order to find more berries.
The Book World
The main consideration for us in designing the book world mechanics surrounds how the player will be able to interact with it. Kerris suggested early in the proceedings that perhaps the player could uncover the text and images within the book with the mouse.
We also played with the idea that perhaps the player un-jumbles the letters/text, as is the case in one of the stories in What Remains of Edith Finch (2017). This developed into an idea that the player unearths glowing "runes" on the paper with the mouse instead, and interacting with them will transform them into text and images. I visualised this as something that appeared magical, burning onto the paper in a similar fashion to how Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring showed the inscription on the one ring glowing and fading.
As a team we discussed the options for actual gameplay, as we wanted players to be able to interact with the illustrations as they they were a game. Two options appealed to us: a point-and-click type mechanic as in Broken Age, or a classic 2D platformer where the player can control the character and have them interact with things.
The latter idea has been done in this specific fashion in the game Devotion (2019), and creates an effective divide between the main game which is first person 3D.
I made a very crude prototype of how this game type would work generally to give Sid an idea of how sections of text and certain images needed to appear one after the other. This would create pacing for the player and mean they couldn't speed through the fables.
Further development of this prototype is taking place on Sid's blog.
As we developed this, and in response to feedback from others, we realised that the prototype mechanics we'd designed didn't properly nail the idea we were trying to communicate. It also created an issue in that it landed the main mechanic of the game in a world that we wanted the player to be less attached to than the other.
From this revelation, we started working on ways to make Maive's world the most interesting part of the game (see above). To achieve this, we simplified our possibilities for mechanics for the book to the below options:
1. The book is a simple animation that appears after an interaction. Maive tells the story whilst the book displays it, projector style.
2. The same visual iteration of the book, but rather than it simply being an animation, it's a side-scroller with very limited left/right movement that uses positional triggers to make the next piece of text/image appear.
3. The book is used in Maive's world to shed light into her past - she interacts with things and it is recorded in the book in a visually appealing but simple way - OR Maive opens the book and a small animation shows past events of Maive's life in storybook form. The latter option is akin to the glitter mechanic in Little Misfortune.
