Talking to people.

Last week I had two appointments. One with Jelle van Doorne, a game designer who graduated last year and with Keoken Interactive the company I did an internship with. I wanted to talk to these people about my tools, my story and gameplay.

I did my presentation to both Jelle and Keoken and they were pretty positive.
I'll try to summarize their feedback:

About the platform. Unity or Twine

Jelle suggested Unity because the programm is more versatile and in Unity I'm able to implement a score system. Where you go to a scene based on a score instead of only the choices you make. That way it's easier to incorporate more gameplay possibilities.

The guys at Keoken on the other hand suggested to use Twine. Because the story and the art are the most important thing in this game. A platform like twine is easy to easy with decent endresults. They thought that for a game prototype, Twine would be ideal.

The story part seems alright according to the people I talked to. It's just a matter of making the gameplay interesting they say. And I couldn't agree more. That's why I'm going to make some small playtests this week to play next week. Those tests would probably be small parts of my game without the artwork. Because artwork is really a production thing and takes too much time for a small test. Just to test if some situations are interesting and if players are interacting with eachother to make the choices.
As I said before choices the players make are either made individual or as a group. Making choices would be the core mechanic but I don't want to make a movie where the players just click and look at images. I want them to interact with the game and with eachother. So I have to come up with some interesting situations where I can focus on these player interactions.

About the world itself. We talked about what the world should look like and we agreed on a big thing. Since the heroes are actually children in a hospital the fantasy world shouldn't be too complicated. Simple forms en simple text. No swearing and foul language for example. And Doctors would probably speak in an incomprehensible language because children don't understand medical terms.

They also suggested that when writing the story I should come up with the end first. At this moment I have most of the situations, characters and locations in mind but the end is what it's all about. It's the climax. And there should be different endings.
The end game so far is that the players find out that they are actually in a hospital and were making up the fantasy world the whole time. The rest of the game leads up to that endgame. I think there should be different endings but we'll see how that goes.

So I'm off to write some small tests. I hope I cna come up with some nice small playtests for next week.