In this recitation, we shared our ideas on the final project and listened to others opinions on that.
First, I’m going to talk about my opinions on my partners’ works. Kaycee intends to build a game named “You are the SUPERHERO” which allow players to control three superheroes to shoot bullets to defeat the Thanos. It is surely a brilliant idea since the Avengers is the hottest topic recently and people are always passionate at games of “beating our enemy”. However, it still could be improved. We have different opinions on how to make this game a better one, but our basic idea is the same: the process of defeating seems too simple with little playability. There are many ways to add more playability to it, for example, we thought about adjusting it to a battle game, making the superheroes movable instead of standing at a certain position and changing the damage of different heroes according to their characteristic. Mimi’s proposal is to create a game called “Darkness Rhapsody” in which players are instructed to going through a maze by hearing the wind. The idea sounds interesting enough and the idea of letting people have an experience of “walking” in the dark is also attractive. To make the game even better and the experience more charming, we had some discussion on complicating the maze and adding a dragon. For Skyler’s final project, we have tried her demo and it is really impressive. She intended to make a game called “Beduffled Snake” in which players must press the opposite key to get the snake go to the direction they want. Since the game is simple but still of great playability, we only gave the advice of adding more aesthetics to the game.
From my perspective, all these proposals are interesting and could be designed for great playability. Moreover, after hearing from everyone’s original ideas, I find most of us are thinking beyond the game. Skyler’s project, for instance, it tests and trains our agility and thoughts. It also reminds us that we should always mind the reverse side while paying attention to our purpose. Our games remind me that technology could be a great tool for us to reveal our true thoughts and reflect back on ourselves. From these projects, I think we have pretty similar definitions on interaction, the difference would not be that significant. But I did find some disagreements in there. For example, I thought that the vision is the best way to show a signal of whether receiving the information or making reactions. I do not deny the importance of sound, smell and other things that could be sensed, but I will clearly not making my final process by designing a game fully depends on hearing. Mimi, on the other hand, has different opinions on that. She believes all the senses are equally important and her project was exactly determined to show the importance of sound.
I have got a lot of feedback on my final project. The one that I consider of great significance was about what players could control the spaceship to do. Originally, I designed to make it only to avoid space junks. Yet I got feedback that it is not attracting and involving enough. My group members suggested I add a missile system to the starship for shooting enemies down. I think it is a piece of good suggestion because it actually added to the playability of this game. Also, another piece of advice on changing the way the players control the starship — from buttons to a joystick — was also taken. According to my group members, my failure in designing would be deciding to use buttons to control the directions of the spaceship since it is not involving enough and contradicts to my original idea of giving the players a sense of controlling a spaceship. While my most successful part would be to design the first-person perspective and using having a layer of cockpit coverage so that it feels more real. I totally agree with these points and I’ve made some corresponding changes to my design.
To sum up, I will make these changes to my project: 1. Adding shooting part instead of just making the starship avoid space junks; 2. Changing the controller from buttons to joystick; 3. I will make the background and cockpit coverage incline a bit when players turn the starship with a joystick; 4. If time allows, I will add a facial recognition system which could put the players’ faces in an astronaut’s suit.