My Work
BVW Round 2 - Deep Sea Cleaners - Design Decisions
What was most elusive for us in this project was a good story. We were set on making an underwater exploration game, but we had problems making our story fit the ideas we had so far. We finally cut back on some interactions that would have not made sense with the story we liked the most and so managed to find a middle ground where our story made sense and the interactions backed it up well enough.
One of our most interesting design decisions was making a co-operative game for a platform usually used for four-player multiplayer. Our balancing could have been better, though, since the guest who steered the submarine had much more control of the experience than the guest who controlled the light and the claw. We found that when designing co-operative games it is important that no guest feels like he is merely tagging along.
This project was particularly unsuccesful when tested by naive guests, which leads directly to important design lessons learned (besides from playtesting the hell out of your games). We found that our frame rate was low and so it made for a confusing experience for new players - we had gotten used to it while testing so we did not realize this in time. We also found that simultaneous ambidextrous controls represent a challenge for guests that are not used to playing video games. A practical tutorial could have helped us overcome this particular problem.