Redesign update(s)

Over the past six months or so I've been revisiting this project after getting some very helpful feedback about the original demo. A quick summary of these insights was that even though the writing was engaging and the story was moving, the actual gameplay aspects of the project were... lacking. So I decided to put the writing aside and focus on what players will actually do.

This led me to see that the gameplay elements were not only stagnant but that they weren't bringing anything to the medium. In other words, the walking simulator elements weren't engaging enough, and as a gameplay activity, it wasn't propping up enough of the story for it to feel meaningful to the player.

I decided to strip the game of these walking elements and have the player choose between different locations on the original map to quickly teleport and initiate those gameplay snippets. But even with these elements removed, the actual gameplay was still pretty limited to the stone-skipping sections, and the rest just felt like a Twine project with a lot of window dressing.

So I decided to redesign the game from the ground up and to take some other advice/lessons I had recently learned to design the types of gameplay that felt most aligned with the feelings I wanted the player to have while experiencing the work. Namely, this feeling is stress, peppered with uncertainty, doubt, and a bit of lonesomeness. So the gameplay that felt the most aligned with this intention was to use quick time events, and mini-game motifs found in arcade games and party games designed by Nintendo (specifically Wario Ware). The quickness of activity, combined with the need to master new techniques against a quickening timer always increased my pulse, and I wanted to bring that tension--and the stress that it incurs--to TTE.

After doing some pen-and-paper design work and thinking about player flow and how to still maintain some of the story beats I want in my project, I've started to get back into Godot and design some of the minigames I came up with. This design process has been great and I keep being reminded how much I love working in Godot, especially when prototyping ideas and quickly iterating on an idea until things start to click. There are still a bit of buggy things that I've needed to work on including some of the physics colliders for the individual objects getting generated into the scene. But overall I'm excited about the progress I'm making. Here's a quick example of one of the vignettes I've been working on: doing the dishes.

These games will be mostly domestic tasks that are on a limited timer. When the timer runs out the player will smash cut to the next activity/minigame. Each game will have unique gameplay elements and quick time events to throw the player off and to make the transition between activities difficult to adjust. The compounding effect will be somewhat frenzied and the player will have to try to negotiate each task while avoiding "breakdowns" incurred from stress. As seen below these games will "cycle" until the third timer runs out and the player is sent to a downtime activity to recoup stress and to delve into the written narrative of the project. 

So now I'm finishing the one game and will hopefully have footage/gifs to share in the coming weeks. To that end, I'll need to do a lot of playtesting to see how folks feel about the design and ask them about the energy/pacing to ensure that it's intended to get folks to feel that slight sense of panic that I'm aiming for.