This House is Not Home
Professor comment:
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This is one of the stronger projects I've seen in this course over several years of teaching it. The tech, art, writing, and audio are all on point, and well above the bar, but more than those qualities, what makes this project stand out is that it has a real sense of confidence around what its trying to achieve. Perhaps another way to put it is that it's clear here that the medium is in service to a creative expression. It's so often the case (and not necessarily in a bad way) that creative expression is a secondary concern to executing the medium.
Basically, this is fire. Excellent job all. I love the game, and the moments it creates are genuinely tense and engaging (those long fingers O_O). So genuinely stoked to see all of your future work. I knocked off a few points largely because a persistent dialog bug kept forcing resets when I was deeply invested in the core action. Overall, big win. Definitely keep in touch, and enjoy your summer everyone.
-MATTHEW ANDERSON, May 12 at 8:53 pm
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Engine: Unity 3D
​Seven peoples team
Spent 1 month
Background:
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​The father of a family has been drinking for a long time and domestically abused his daughter. Unable to bear the pain, the daughter chose to run away from the family. She will collect clues to choose between running away from home, reporting to the police, or attacking her father, etc.
the Professional one's comment:
First Step: Team-up and Group Intro
Our team includes two programmers, two 3D artists, one music and sound effects designer, one system&Story designer, and one level&gameplay designer.
Second Step: Concept & Pitch
Each of us wrote a one-page game design document as a pitch, which included the type of game, main gameplay, emotional tone, macro theme, and visual style. The knockout rounds took 4 hours.
Third Step: Vertical Slice & Playtest
In the vertical slice stage, we decided to create a day, night, and date cycle system. The clues will change daily during the game, and the enemies will be more alert.
After testing, we are happy that players understand what we are doing. Well, Basically, yes. While it's true that we didn't do enough to guide the player through our initial version of the level and lacked guidance on the mechanics of getting the evidence, it wasn't a major understanding problem for us game students who play the game a lot. But by and large, it's good. For example, our opening intro gives the player a general vibe that our game is a game about domestic violence, and some of the environmental narratives in the game elaborate on this thing, such as the hole in the wall and the gun in the safe.
Players liked this core of our evidence gathering because the mechanics fit the game's setting very well. But equally, we also wanted to go later in the game's narrative to reinforce the tendency of domestic violence victims to have Stockholm Syndrome, as we expressed in the synopsis at the beginning of the game. This would also feed back into our core mechanics
The most important thing is that players want to play more! [The image below was the current version in VP[vertical slice prototype]]
Fourth Step: Dev. Date writedown
It took us about a month to complete 2 months of content. We were also surprised, so we started fixing bugs and updating art assets. We then revisited the Vertical Slice and wanted to add some more elements. Level-wise, I needed to expand the map and increase its connectivity.
Fifth Step: Full Production & Prototype test again
We finished the QA test before Full Production period, so that we just want to provide a unique and no bugs experience for our player.
Fun stuff:
​This is my pitch in the beginning of the Concept phase. We neglect Metrodvinia because we want to make a 3D First person perspective game.
And some "communication bugs" happened
