itch.io

Hey everyone! Just a quick devlog for this week. I've got some sketches that I've lined out and am in the process of scanning in to rig out the mouse character in full - for now, we've also made a level layout! JC's done a great job implementing the level so far, and all we gotta do is make sure we can actually interact with things in the level! For now, we've split the digital portion of the game into 2 parts - a host who navigates and does a lot of the "commander" work for the mech, and the two client players who do maintenance work on the ship throughout the day.

First things first though, here are the sketches and their lined version, which are going to be scanned in and colored so they match the mouse head thats serving as our "map indicator" icon (but will be put atop the body soon, and is also attached here)

I've also been working on editing my portion of the tabletop section of the game, a mini-tabletop game that I've dubbed "Elephant" - we've had a playtest for it in class, and I made the edits according to what I learned. 

Continuing onwards and upwards - I'm finally in the wrestling ring for MLAPI, and its already MLAPI 1 - Robin  0. I followed a tutorial to the letter and didnt manage to get it to work... sigh. Hopefully, In this next week I'll be able to make that score 1-1. 

Thats all from me for now, hopefully I'll remember to update this with any major updates that happen before next week instead of doing it day of. 

Robin, signing out.

Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've posted on the devlog, so here's an update

Throughout the week, we've been working on building and playtesting various parts of the game - attempting to bifurcate the process if you will. On Friday of last week, we managed to playtest the social meta-game that JC's been building, and that went pretty dang well! We gained a lot of interesting feedback, some of it pertaining to the tone of the messages that people would say, and how people reacted within the game to form social interactions that were either uncomfortable or hilarious. 

While JC's been working on that and the 3d unity build (which we're still editing the concept of), I've been working on a particular unity build that's all centered around how to manage a mech, mostly via numbers and different ways of pressing a subset of keys. 

The system itself isn't super complicated, and the player interacts with the mech solely through Q, W, E, R and the numpad, but the complicated portion is making sure that you piloting the mech itself doesn't feel aimless. Feeling pointless would be interesting, as that's one of the major concept's we've been playing with in our own playtests, but in this case, I want there to be a solid goal for the player to work towards. Just as a note, the images that I'm using here are just some picrews that I happened to have saved on my computer for generating OC's for other tabletop games, or just messing around. The final images that I hope to use will be of mice that I drew, and ideally they would change with the state of the players. 

Players? Yeah! Once the project is minimally functional - in that a player can interact with the mech interface but not have it be so pretty that it makes it complicated - I'm going to be working on the central tenet of the base digital game: multiplayer! So far, I took one look at how unity used to handle multiplayer, said "That's not so bad" and then proceeded to figure out that they had completely abandoned that as of 2018-2019 (I'm pretty sure). Instead, they've shifted into a system that's called MLAPI, which was... so intimidating (and my part of the project so barebones and incomplete) that I just kind of, stopped. At least, I've stopped for now. Once I'm able to make this single player host version, making a client version should be relatively trivial, because I can just change some of the names and messages around. Then it's all MLAPI stuff, all the way till the end

The thing is, my build is actually just a giant test in the first place. We don't actually want this to be the game almost at all - managing meters, yes, but the idea that it would all happen through UI is somewhat of a personal project for me, almost completely separate from this project. The main thing that this is testing (which might seem like a question with an obvious answer) is "Is it fun to pilot a mech?" - our question is "Is it fun to pilot a mech in a way that's similar to this, but platforming?" The other concept this is testing is our ability to use MLAPI to make a multiplayer game in the first place - and would that game be fun. 

Anyways, that's all from me for today. We'll add some of our more interesting notes from playtesting in the future. 

As always, thanks for reading. Robin, signing out.

Making a Mech for a Mouse: Prototypes Part Primero

Prototype 1:

In this prototype, we required a couple materials, but most of them can be found at a craft store. Namely, we’re using a set of pipe cleaners (the multicolored ones), and a hot glue gun. Things in this prototype that can’t be bought at a craft store: 2 sets of music, one upbeat and one tense (we’re using Music for your dog (3 hours) and the music from “Who wants to be a millionaire, $640,000 question.”), and 2 volunteers, and if you want, 2 facilitators to change the music.

In this prototype, both volunteers should be told this:

One of you should sit on the ground, and the other stand or sit at a table. The one on the ground is able to talk, while the other is highly encouraged not to. The one sitting on the ground is to give directions to the volunteer at the table on what to build with the pipe cleaner and the hot glue gun.

Unbeknownst to the two volunteers. The two facilitators on either side should have access to being able to play the 2 types of music respectively. Whenever the building volunteer is constructing with pipe cleaners, the upbeat music should be played, and whenever the hot glue gun is even touched, they should switch to the tenser music.

The time limit is anywhere from 3-7 minutes, or however long either volunteer wants to stick around and see the product of their attempted collaboration.

So what’s the point of this? Well, we reasoned that first of all, even the most experienced hot-gluer is going to burn themselves, or get tied up in the little glue strings from time to time, and you might ask, what’s your point there? And our point is thus: What if your actions, your decisions and directions could cause bodily harm or discomfort to not you, but explicitly the bodily harm or discomfort of another person? Are you comfortable with the idea that your actions are enacting direct consequences on another person: especially a person who is very much encouraged to not be able to communicate back, express their discomfort or pain? The power dynamic here is clear, but in this power dynamic, how does that make you feel? Those are the important questions that we’re seeking to answer in this prototype.

Prototype 2:

This one’s a bit simpler. Have a DM/Facilitator narrate the sounds of a mech battle, represented in colorful language, and played out through a game of battleships between two non-talking except for shot callouts (and optionally non-seeing) participants (in the case of non-seeing use a facilitator with access to both boards). Hits or misses shouldn’t be narrated simply as such, they should be done through the story of what one might hear inside a mech, with a battle between two of them.

The point of this one is more about making narratives where the “main character(s)” are more disconnected from the goings-on: they have direct control but they are unable to see the direct results of what happens around them.

Prototype 3:

Have 2 people sit down with eachother. One of them uses the ttrpg framework of “Emotional Machine Diagnostics” and the other, silently, enacts the musings of the other person.

If we can’t take care of ourselves, but we can take care of other things, who are we? Why for some is it easier to take care of others than ourselves?

Here's a bunch of our first prototypes and what questions they ask.
If you get a chance to play with them, feel free to reply here and tell us what you found!

In terms of whats required from the class: 

1. We mostly engaged with brainstorming and writing things down as we went along - yes-anding each other, and setting a timelimit for 'blue-sky' thinking. We pushed for weird and out there ideas, and drilled into what we found interesting, and then drilled back out when we felt we were going too deep. 

2. Constraints discovered:

- Scope: we end up really big a lot of the time, with grandiose ideas that might not be possible within the timeframe of capabilities or the abilities we have at the current moment

- - We did our priority assessment as a way of assessing whats possible: again, as we go along, we often don't think about scope as a constraint, just thinking about what we want out of a game, in terms of feelings, mechanics, what-have-you. When we go through processes like the spreadsheeting we do, we're forced to think through things a little more analytically, and allows us to say what is and what isn't possible. 

3. We're fundamentally interested in a lot of different things - I tend to go more fantasy based, and JC grounds his in reality and sci-fi. However, our differences tend to compliment each other and our passion for game-making ends up intertwining extremely well. We both end up with more interesting and more complete ideas than we could make alone, even if what we make isn't what the other had in terms of "grand vision" - we end up with something that's more realized.

Hey yall, this is our devlog for this quarter. I'm Robin, and JC will be posting on here as well. We threw around a bunch of ideas about the self, feelings, the ego, and the viewpoint of both the player and the creator.
Both of us feel like there's a lot of exploration to be done with the point of view of player characters, and how they interact with the world, whether in a positive or negative light, and one of our most prevalent ideas at the moment is a game based around a mouse in a massive mech - we're talking like, 10 times bigger than a tree massive. Evangelion massive. I've assembled here a sort of mood-board with the references we were thinking of when we were drilling deeper into this idea, but we're actually still pretty open to other ideas, just this one is the most developed so far.

In addition to talking about the mouse in the mech as a standalone concept, we also dipped into the idea of solitude and morality in the context of this game. What happens when you are forced to live your life in isolation, only coming into contact with beings that you can never touch, life outside your own that must be taken to survive? How do you grapple with that moral decision, not knowing whether those people could be reasoned with, or even if they were there at all? Who are you when you're alone, and whose decisions are you making? We thought a lot about who we are as people, and what that means both in and out of context of social life, and how to take that to its extreme in an interesting way. The mouse game also came about through the idea of "Games that make a player feel small" - and we decided that the symbolism of being a mouse accomplishes this. We also thought about the mix of (hyper)realism and mixing that with a super cartoon-ish character and the aesthetic decisions of that.

Lastly, heres the list of the other base concepts that we had throughout our brainstorming sessions:

-Beauty and Sublimity in the mundane
-Finding Magic at 50
-Self-Sabatoging Character
-Townscaper Tactical Game
-Space Strategy Game
-Electric Football (as a base)

Thanks for reading, and we hope to stay with yall throughout the development process.