This week was our halfway milestone. Along with presenting our progress thus far, we spent the week solidifying our design and paper prototyping our gameplay loop. We also created a short demo video of our prototype to explain the flow of the game. And lastly, we were put in touch with a dedicated writer who will help us with the narrative and dialogue. Anna is a writing-major student from CMU.
Design
We discussed using a hallway mechanic where the player could scroll through a 2D representation of a hallway and interacting with objects and characters in it.
- Explore the school by scrolling through the hallways.
- Meet characters and other students. This is how the player first meets our guide and friend, Alice.
- Talk to Alice to find out about Meowwer, the school’s social media platform.
- Find out about “student issues”.
- Investigate the issues by clicking on the posts on Meowwer.
- Find the issues in the credibility of the posts and articles that are shared as references.
- Go to Meowgle, the fictional search engine to conduct research.
- Bookmark reliable sources and share them with Alice.
- Once the student government replies with the research that the player provided, the reaction to this response can be seen in the hallways and on Meowwer.
One of the decisions that we had to make was whether to show the player character in the hallway or not. Showing the player character meant that the player would have a lesser sense of embodiment. So we decided against showing the player as a character in the game. This also helped us with tackling issues like player customization.
Art
Reference art of the social media interface and phone interface
Tech
The functional implementation of the social media app on the phone was completed. The player can now open the app, read the different posts made by the students and investigate their credibility.
Next Steps
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Design
- Level design for the news content
- Interpreting writer’s story ideas
- Playtesting the Anime style with middle schoolers
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Art
- Visual Concepts for the exploring section
- Background images
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Development
- Implementing features for Meowwer
- Polish the bookmark feature
- Develop the exploring section
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Production
- Reach out to resources for playtesting