This post describes the process myself and the team went through to decide on a veritcal slice for the game. A complete outline and summary can be found on the shared blog.

For our game’s vertical slice, we wanted to focus on crafting a self-contained experience that demonstrates the core mechanics, narrative tone, and visual identity of the post-apocalyptic survival management game. Luckily the original GDD details the game’s narrative milestones (Story), below I’ve turned the milestones into a diagram that can be easily visualised.

We planned to include the pivotal point of the game with players being lead to choose the ultimate goal at the end of their playthrough, however we felt that we wouldn’t be showing much of the heavy hitting narrative aspects of the game until the very end. Knowing that there is such an emphasis on the family relationships we decided to zone in on that, making the player to interact with all four family members and making those narrative decisions the drive for progression. The GDD discusses the use of random and narrative events, for simplicity of the vertical slice we decided to create a linear series of structured events the player must go through until they have to make the decision of the ultimate goal (offworld, purge or adapt)

Doing this meant that the management genre would only assist in progression – by making a decision in a dialogue scene players would choose a narrative branch and then work towards progression to the next narrative branch by completing a specific resource requirement associated with that player choice. For example: choosing to help Arnold develop more arms for the security of the camp would require X amount of Y.

This veritcal slice provides a small but complete look into the game’s world, ensuring that every system – management and decision-making – works cohesively. Moving forward, we will begin development of the UI, expand the narrative depth, and polish the art and sound design to enhance immersion.