Limitations, and how to get around them – Project Blog #2

Now this should be more expected as I’ve already done one of them so this should require zero explanation, let’s go.

What happened after the last Project Blog

Unfortunately, we found out a series of limitations within the Tango, so some of the initial design choices detailed in my last blog has been discarded, along with some of the planned features.

For starters, Tango’s mapping of space is 1:1 based, for every inch in the game, we need to map out an inch of area in real life for the game to be played. This completely shot down the idea of multi-roomed floorplan due to we cannot find a place that large in our school, or anywhere else for that matter. Additionally, because of this exact reason, it will create problems in our upcoming presentation and everyday testing due to needing a fair amount of empty space, which is not easy to come around between classrooms and force us to test our game in bigger areas. Even with greatly undersized room size, we still need a space to move around. Also we cannot undersize the room any smaller (to fit within the classroom) since that would defeat our core mechanic.

In the end, we shrink the original apartment down to an cabin with some clever placement of walls and other elements to fit with Tango’s limitation. We also simplified some other core game mechanics to fit with the smaller scope.

It’s entirely possible, if having enough time and budget, to fully map out the space for a full apartment room. However with the current time and scope, this is totally impossible.

Another problem with the original design is a bit of an irony. Prior in the design phase, we have already decided that if we want to effectively scare people. we should have the player play under the dark, i.e without any external lighting. However, we soon found out that Tango uses light to track player movement and more importantly location. Oops.

Of course that is easy to fix – If we cannot make the player play the game in a dim environment, the only way is to make the game itself dark. Of course, making the game dark meaning there needs to be something that tells the player about their surroundings due to the dim lighting would easily cause player to miss stuff. And we don’t want the player to miss anything especially in a gameplay focusing on finding things in the dark. We’re going to work out something from that.

Other than the limitations discovered (together with the one that Tango didn’t work well with heights but I thought I covered that already), our project is going smoothly according to the original design document.

Until next time.

 

Post a Comment