The Aftermath of Challenging Stage 2

Hello everyone!

I apologize for the lapse in posts lately, and intend to use this one to catch up as much as possible. Short story, we passed through Challenge 2 with little bumps! And we're getting ourselves together to Challenge stage 3, probably the week after next.
This weekend will be sort of a double-whammy for posts as we have a separate assignment to do for the core portion of this class. Let's get to it, then.

So the past few weeks have consisted of trying to flesh out the 'masquerade' concept I talked about in my last post. It's been fleshed out substantially since then. The chef one was left to cool a bit since it was already much more developed. Recently, however, I did do a reboot of the chef's based on some comments from our lead designer. He asked that I give the other chefs more personality in the same way that the green chef (the punk-looking one) had personality. I changed him up a bit too, just for some fun and to give more of a nod to his inspiration (Guy Fieri).

Moving along though, let's continue to the masquerade idea and how it's morphed. We started originally with it at the sort of vague idea of masks having a connection to upgrading abilities in mechanics and such. I took that and ran with it, giving it a little bit of a purgatory/hellish feel. 

Players would choose masks based on how their characters lived their life. This would affect their passive abilities during battle. For example, a person who lived a vain life would have an ability that would go off that would give them a 'shield of their own brilliance'. The downside to it would be something along the lines of everyone's attacks being magnetized to the vain player after the shield goes down, making them take increased damage.

The players would then be fighting on a metaphorical stage where the players would be judged on their fighting skills and whether or not they could ascend from purgatory. Their abilities and skills they could choose would be based on the deeds they committed while they were alive. It had a sort of 7 sins sort of feel to it, especially so with the hell and purgatory themes (when all their lives were lost, the player would fall through a trapdoor with flames gushing out).
Going into class, there were a lot of holes that were poked into this temporary concept (understandably so). Our classmates and professors liked the idea of the masks, and also the hint of character creation in a genre its not usually in. The idea still needed more fleshing out.

So, on Thursday, we got together and decided on our art style. We had a week prior to figure out arguments of the pros and cons of each. 

The major argument against the chef idea, while it was very cohesive, was that when humor falls flat, it falls hard. Several of our group members were very worried about this. We didn't spend as much time fleshing out mechanics and reasoning for the chef game because we had already worked everything out for it, more or less. So we spent most of our time trying to find something for the masquerade idea.

We finally worked our way to an idea we could all agree upon and that had something in it for all of us. We latched more onto the ghostly-qualities of our characters and stripped away most of the religious affiliations and just kept it to sort of an afterlife theme. The players will be selecting ghosts of those who have lived in a house over the many years it has been there. They want to be the only one haunting the property, so they fight, using ghostly ectoplasmic abilities and items possessed with ghostly energy. Being an old house, each item has its history and the person it belonged to. As a secondary mechanic, we are also considering being able to possess objects in the house to hinder your enemies. A common example is possessing a chandelier and having it fall down.

One of the moves we have created, blink, seems to be really favored by players based on play-testing. Because of this, it's picked a lot, which causes balance issues over other moves. Our designers discussed this in our meeting and we played around with the idea of powering the blink down a bit and replacing it with the dodge mechanic we have in already. Players new to playing our demo hardly used the dodge or didn't understand it, so changing it to fit the context of ghosts seemed natural. We thought it'd be cool to have the 'mist blink' ability play into interacting with the environment as well.

Overall, I'm very happy we were able to come to a decision after all of the thoughtful discussion we had. I'm still fond of the chef idea, but I'm happy that we were able to take the masquerade concept and make it as solid. I also really love the aesthetic of old mansions. It's a plus, too, that I can keep the mask idea that everyone was so fond of and continue to work with the ghosts. 

Here's hoping that what we show in class will be met with interest and interesting discussions! Stay tuned!