NeverYear Games Week 4

This has been an interesting week for a few reasons. First of all, our team was sort of split into two groups temporarily to complete various tasks. I was also supposed to be gone all weekend, but because of an issue with scheduling at my job, I was unable to do so. Thanks to this, I didn't end up missing anything from being away from the group, but it means that I'll be missing whatever happens next weekend instead. That aside, I'm surprisingly excited for our newest idea, Death: The Game (working title). One of the things I worked on with Mancino was a systems doc where we thought of a lot of possible ways that we could kill the player in a creative way that they could use to progress further in the game. After doing that, we took it to the next level and started combining possible deaths such as:

• Fire + Poison: The player is blocked by a destructible wall, so they absorb a lot of gaseous poison from the environment and drag their corpse to the wall. They then get themselves lit on fire and run to their poison-bloated corpse to blow it up, taking the wall with it.
• Poison + Enemy: The player has the opportunity to poison themselves and drop their corpse into a pit with an enemy. The enemy will then eat the poisoned corpse and be killed because of it.
• Falling + Webs: The player is faced with a drop that’s too far to survive, but they want to get down without leaving a corpse behind. There are uninhabited webs in the pit that the player can use to slow their fall and land safely.

One inspiration for this came from Life Goes On, a puzzle platformer where you use your own corpses to solve the levels.

Another inspiration was a personal favorite flash game of mine, The Company of Myself, in which the player makes shadow clones of themselves that follow the same path the player just took. This is a self-cooperative game that has a similar mechanic to what we see happening in Death: The Game.

NeverYear Games Week 3

This week at NeverYear Games was another week full of concepting and changes. We ended up scrapping Mage-Man because the gameplay was far too basic. During the course of the week, we came up with an idea for a game that involved two people sharing one controller in a cooperative dungeon crawler. We eventually scrapped that as well because, yet again, the gameplay was too boring. We eventually ended up with a MetroidVania type game where you used your own corpses as ways to progress in the game. We also switched our engine to Unity, something that we're all familiar with.

NeverYear Games Week 2

This week at NeverYear Games was rather different from the last one. First of all, we ended up spending the entire week on further developing our "Mage-Man" idea. Over the course of a few meetings, the idea changed from a whimsical fantasy universe to a dark modern-day one with a lot of psychological issues being dealt with. After mulling over this for a bit, we realized that we had moved way too far away from our original idea and that the game was becoming much too dark for our liking. The week rounded out for me with some prototyping with John Mancino, the other designer at NeverYear, and some research about Shovel Knight. We plan to focus a lot more on "We Love Nuclear Armageddon" (yes, I know the name keeps changing) next week, while John and I finish up the "Mage-Man" prototype for the end of our two week sprint cycle.