Devlog 5: Making the mundane fun
So, I've written before about how this is proving to be a challenging game to write. SPIRIT is a slice-of-life story about 20-year-old uni student and knowing that I'm going to have to make everyday situations like lectures and group work sessions fun and engaging has been incredibly intimidating. So, I thought I might as well write a devlog on this --how do you make the mundane interesting and fun? I lean on these three principles:
1. Throw some actual gameplay in. Skill checks, maybe some minigames. Make the lectures, group works, and other mundane tasks a kind of puzzles, that the player has to solve. I'll also do my best to make the gameplay open-ended, so that there are multiple ways to 'attack' each problem.
2. Sprinkle in constant interesting tidbits of information --geography can be dry at times, but there's also countless fun facts and engaging topics, and much of it ties into discussions and issues that affect all of us, every day.
3. Let Hanna be Hanna. Give the player room to distract themselves, be a total clown, or just simply screw up, often in unexpected ways. Even if you do your best to be a model student, you should expect failure and comedy. As a side note, I'm working to make humour in the mundane a constant throughout the game.
For example, I've almost finished a pretty big and complex part where you attend a mandatory seminar and you have to research moraines with your group. You can choose to get right to work, but you can also waste time checking social media or browsing the Internet, and since you're tired on the day of the seminar, you will have to pass skill checks to actually concentrate on your work, enticing players to explore other options. Between the different approaches, skill checks, and interactions with your group members (with ample characterization and room for humour), there will be plenty of different ways to play through this part of the game, not to mention ways to sabotage yourself, intentionally or unintentionally.
Of course, student life isn't all lectures, seminar, study lab sessions, and group work (and if you're a student and that is your student life, you're doing it wrong). SPIRIT will offer all kinds of free-time activities with the gang, with engaging stories, dilemmas, mini-games, and, at times, important topics to discuss.
Note: Devlogs will be bi-weekly from here on. Hopefully by the next one I will have integrated the game with Unity and actual ingame screenshots to show you. Stay tuned!