A Chat with Charles
Yesterday we were fortunate enough that Charles happened upon us while we were having a group meeting and after we explained our project he was able to provide us with a wealth of insight and reference material. Plenty to think about and work from in order to ensure our project works out well.
First of all, Charles mentioned some of the first games that popped into his head while we were explaining it, first of which was Spore.
Spore has an iteration process to it that involves customising an organism with various structural elements necessary for survival, and then sending it out to interact with ecosystems, before customising it again and again and sending it out again and again in order to progress. This gameplay is similar to what we want to achieve with our vehicle iteration process, and it will be very important to look to Spore so that we can see what did and did not work with this procedural iteration that puts the design of something so pivotal to gameplay in the hands of the players.
Next Charles mentioned Enter the Gungeon. Enter the Gungeon takes bullets and guns and uses it for pretty much every single element of the game. HUD, Characters, Environment, and Gameplay are all stylised after bullets or guns. This creates a complete and consistent aesthetic as everything has a central focus to build from. Charles brought this up to point out to us the importance of having this central theme and style to build around. This is a crucial thing for us to remember especially as we work in our own roles, as this could easily lead to large discrepancies between the style of the art and the writing or sound for example. While intentionally having a schism between the styling of elements of a piece of media can serve to send a message, and this might be something to consider, we have to remember to be thinking about whether or not our components fit together coherently.
The third point that was something for us to think about that would help us with keeping our consistent theme, would be to hark back to the MDA aesthetics for play and choose two to really focus on. We chose Sensation, Discovery, and Narrative when we first looked at these aesthetics and this brought us back to remembering to use these, but also to be quite strict with them to avoid our theme gettings tangled up in a mess of aesthetics. An example Charles told us to look at was Doki Doki literature club, which is instead a Narrative focus aesthetic, as the story is the only focus of the game, with the gameplay being very secondary, consisting almost entirely of a single button press to progress. If we contrast how games like Doki Doki play and what players feel when playing it, with how Aeronautica is supposed to play and players feel, then we can get a sense of how best to apply and articulate our aesthetics.
Finally, a really important part for us to consider, and more importantly articulate, is the conceptual and contextual reasons for having the game in VR. We need to make sure to rationalise using VR in the context of the specific experience we want players to have.