Following the discussions of a meeting with the teams technical designer (Joe), we went back and forth on changes that not only needed to be made in the game for the first playtest, but also for the game in further development.

What isn’t working

The gameplay issues he found with the prototype were directed at the management part of the game and how uneventful it felt – it didn’t feel fun and was repititive. We came to the conclusion that we needed to drive player motivation. Adding a risk factor seemed to be the best course of action to encourage players to strategically gather specific resources that otherwise felt useless to until later on in the vertical slice (tech, bio).

Suggestions & Changes

I suggested introducing a “weekly requirements” list of resources that a player would need to have gathered by the end of the game week. This would address the concern of “why am I wasting time gathering anything other than whats required to progress?”. This may add another level of challenge to the game whereby not meeting the requirements would mean meeting the game’s lose condition, having players restart the game week.

Branching off from the weekly requirements mechanic Joe discussed NPC happiness/satisfaction and how gathering certain materials might lower or raise it. Implementing this would also allow for replayability as players could restart the game to focus on a different NPC than they did last time. It also relates closely to what Franek spoke about in his GDD about being able to consult family characters.

Additionally, we spoke about an inventory item cap, where players are granted a specific amount of inventory space to hold their resources. This would discourage them from gathering too much when it is unncessary and also add another aspect to the management genre.

Food Resource Revised

I pointed out how we need to stress the importance of food gathering for survival, and how it should be implemented as a daily food consumption mechanic – after every day the player would have their food supply reduced. This would further enhance the idea that the survivors are real people under the player’s leadership – their survival depends on you as the leader. Failure to gather sufficient food for the camp (go below 0) would meet the game’s lose condition, having them restart the game week.