Devlog week #6 - Workshop Report

Hello spacemans! (or is it spacemen? :p)

Last week, we worked on the preparations for a workshop. This workshop had the objective of brainstorm with people from our focus group and the results were outstanding, as we had a lot of new input from the participants' fresh minds. The workshop took place on discord, Saturday morning, 17th April 2021, and we counted with 6 participants.

The activities I carried out with them were focused on the map and quests of our game. Firstly, we discussed with the participants the pros and cons of having an open world with procedural generation VS having a map with a beggining, middle and end (a finite sequential map if you may). We found interesting the idea of having the map divided into 3 large areas, which follow a progression in our game. The player would start in the 1st Area, complete all missions and gather resources and THEN move to the 2nd Area, with a designated boss being the bridge between both areas. This boss could be a fleet of enemy ships, some heavily armed gate or a turret system that needed to be destroyed in order to clear our way. Plenty of ideas are on the table.

Then, the participants suggested objects we could add to our map. We saw some crazy sticky notes on Miro, I'll give them that! Bellow you can see their valuable contributions!

With that we had a solid idea of what we could bring to our game's map. Moving on, it was time to discuss the Quest system. Quests are very important in this type of games because they are what keeps the player going and what gives them a destination/goal to reach.  The following activity would give us some understanding about the potential quests bring to our game as what could go wrong. Using the 6-Thinking Hats strategy we discussed "Quests" from 6 different perspectives. If you want to learn more about this technique visit this link. 

The main conclusions were that side quests aren't effective if they aren't interesting to the player, and could bring balancing issues because a player that completes all side quests is a lot stronger than a player who doesn't complete them. One solution for these problems came up during the Green Hat moment: 

>>In each area the player is given several quests, let's say 5. If the player completes 3/5 quests, they are rewarded with a powerful and necessary reward to complete that area and defeat the boss. This allows the player to chose what side-quests he wants to complete and, if they want to be achievers and complete all 5 quests, they will receive rewards such as references to our amazing story and easter eggs of the team development.

After this brilliant decision, we asked them to write down at least one quest they would like to see in our game! If you know portuguese, I invite you to check them out:

This way I concluded the activities I had prepared and it's now time for Diogo and Tiago to have their time with the 6 huge helpers to this project. A special thanks to Vasco C, Vasco P, Inês, Sandra, Rafael and José!

And thank YOU for reading this large devlog! :)