Since we are about to make a pitch of our game, I need to develop the idea a little bit to understand myself what I’m about to do. So first of all I need to decide on what I want from this project and set up some key points as well as personal objectives (which I will still need in future for the report).
I have already done my research, which helped me to clarify some concept points. For example, the relation between story and gameplay. That I must find the way to support the narrative with interaction that player is about to perform (I’ll elaborate on that down below). Environmental storytelling will play a significant role in the project as this is one of the main sourses of information and ques in wordless games. I also started thinking about particular game mechanics like choices, so that different choices (for example choose to go to an abandoned village which will lead to some kind of flashback memory or proceed through the snow field and not get that) will lead to different bits of information, to actually affecting the ending, but can bring some amount of replayability as you can see from the list of my inspirations like games from Dark pictures.
My main challendge to overcome here is to compensate lack of game mechanics with visuals and story because I’m still lacking enough coding skills to implement something complicated or completely new for me as I’ll have to spend a lot of time learning the coding itself while project development will stay on halt untill I manage to mage a small game feature. So since I’m making a story – then I’m making a story, not a challenge experience.
Also, following my case study analysis scheme, I made the same analysis for my future game to help me understand, that the features I’m going to implement are there for a reason, but not just because I want to.
Also as you can see, I’m already thinking through the commection between story and gameplay. So that as the game proceeds, the cat will get more and more tired up to the point when the player has to literary drag him further to eventually bring him to the final destination. I believe that playing around with character controlls will be an interesting solution to intertwining gameplay and narrative.