This week in "Kurofune: Descobrimos Portugueses", we are giving some insight behind our decisions concerning the game design of our game.
Hello everyone, welcome to another weekly DevLog from 3PAStudios, where we explain our thought process bit by bit on how our game is being made and give a piece of our mind on this journey of game developing. If you have any questions or tips to give us be sure to post a comment or talk to us in our social medias at twitter and instagram.
Overhaul Design
For avid readers of our DevLogs, its clear that at most times our game it's pretty confusing, full of UI elements, different variables, pop-ups, events and collapsing UIs. Even if he limited the number of things that happens at once, it's not a permeant solution, it's just running away from the problem.
We implemented a tutorial, explain our mechanics and variables one at a time, cleared our UI elements and tried to make sure nothing would overlap on other elements so now our game it's at least eligible, so now our next step is changing most of our UI elements and events to be icon based instead of having a full description.
Level Design
As some people can remember, our game had multiple scenes such as behind outside a Tavern, inside a Tavern, at a loading doc, etc... Now our game only consists of 3 scenes, opposing our old approach of having 20+ scenes.
This is made this way for a cleaner game, simple and not overloaded, and adds a bigger element of immersion by passing most of the game in a single scene, our Map scene. This was also a decision we made to make our game into a scope that is manageable duo to our time constraint.
For a more in depth explanation of these 3 scenes, check out our DevLogs #2 and #5 as the Game Design behind these features are all explain on those.
Conclusion:
The biggest lesson we as a team learned during the development of our game is that although it's good to aim for the starts with a big scope, during the game development we always need to reduce the scope of our game, it's better to have a small game polished and finished then having a huge game that is broken and unplayable.
Join us next week's DevLog as we are approaching the end of development as are close to releasing our game.
