First Development Cycle

During this week, the group discussed several aspects regarding the Design Document assignment.

Our first goal was to create some Experience Goals. By specifying the goals for player’s feelings and motivations, we can turn the focus on achieving those goals. We started with about 9 Experience Goals, that would later be merged and optimized into 4. These mainly stress the need for strategic thought, replayability, and cooperation. After discussing these priorities, the group focused on reviewing similar games and drawing parallels between our game and real-life activities. For this, we decided to split the group, and have each pair review each other’s work. Tiago and myself were tasked with finding similar games and measuring their contribution to our own. We divided the search into turn-based strategy (games like Pokémon or XCOM, for example) and cooperative style games (Super Mario or Portal 2). These games offered us some inspiration on some aspects that we intend to replicate in Deuce’s Silent Tower. To explore our original idea of limiting cooperation between players, we turned to card games like Sueca, where communication between partners is not allowed. However, we still feel like we need some play-testing and feedback.

Defining player personas was the next step, and again, the team decided to split efforts. Each team member was tasked with creating a persona and a scenario of play. The scenarios were created with 2 personas each, since this is a two-player cooperative game.

Overall, this week’s development was essential to further define several aspects of Deuce’s Silent Tower and to define our target audience. The discussion allowed us to check a lot of boxes that we didn’t know were missing.