Hello Hello!

This week we went over the design document again since we had the delivery on Tuesday, it was mostly done we just had to do some minor adjustments and add some polish. Now we started discussing what we're gonna do with the prototypes, I'm gonna be doing some challenge room paper prototypes as well as a bit of combat prototype in Unity.

At this point I'm still in the research phase, I consider these challenge rooms to be very important to the game because they will be a big source of player interaction through cooperation. During the game, players will probably have a tendency to form teams but there is always the possibility of backstabbing or team separation due to the way the game is designed. Therefore, in my opinion, it's important that, in these rooms,  players form some sort of connection. But this connection can't be as simple as players seeing each other as tools, they have to actually develop some sort of empathy for one another.  This will make the social aspect interesting because although the "optimal strategy" is to trust no one if they face these challenges together it will both be harder to betray or leave someone and will also feel worse to be betrayed or left by someone. Of course, social dynamics are really hard to control and predict but I believe that if this is well designed it will lead to very interesting experiences.  In order to accomplish this, I'm looking at a bunch of different multiplayer coop games that tackle cooperation in different ways and I also saw this great talk about the design of Sky: Children of the Light, where John Hughes shares some of the design process and ideas that lead to the game's empathetic social interactions.

I also got access to the Unity project, uploaded it to gitea, and have finally started writing a bit of code! Hopefully next weak I'll be able to share some footage of the actual prototypes rather than just writing a bunch of stuff that no one wants to read. 

See you then