Witch's Garden - Design
After the initial concept was approved, My first step was defining the actual pillars and confirming the other team members were on board.
We started the next step of defining the core mechanics of the planting system as a group. I led the discussion surrounding combining ingredient types, plant stats such as grow time, yield, and traits into a modular system more reminiscent of a strategy game.
I took it upon myself to sit down and interview a friend of mine that specializes in botany to help get some clarification on the gamification of real life examples into game mechanics. (my favorite thing to do). I then shared this with the rest of the team and it helped us lock in the designs for how we wanted our Cloning and Hybrid system to work
Steve's Color Theory
One thing I was absolutely adamant on from the start was using consistent colors and making use of how we displayed them throughout the game to help players quickly build a mental model and make our somewhat deep little strategy game easily understandable. I was so passionate about this, that it became a joke to refer to this system as Steve's color theory.
Development Pacing
The next thing I am quite proud of was solving a production issue we then had with the design. We had a lot of different ingredient, plant and potion ideas through out the team. Some members of the group were convinced that we should define ALL of these before moving onto other matters. This left us spinning our wheels for awhile and was quite impossible given the color requirements. Finally I said enough is enough, we have to approach this in chunks and as the producer on the project I used my authority to say we were going to come up with things in roughly the following formula:
4-5 base plants, 1 combo plant, 2 potions
This quickly unstuck the entire team. Instead of endlessly throwing more ideas into the mix. It allowed artists to start working on the first set of models, narrative to work on the story behind the first two potion requests, programmers to actually start coding the system and design to move on to other systems.
I defined the calculations for how plant quality would be generated.
(Notice the love for colored markers)
Player Journey Map
Worked with another designer to make a player journey map.
Designing spells, research and more
..details coming soon.
