Cosmixology
Tools:
Unity, Visual Studio, Bolt, Inkle, Shader graph,
Substance Painter, FMod, GitHub
Roles:
Game Designer, Programmer
Overview
This was a project created with a team of 7 people as studio
Balter Games over an 8 month period.
Cosmixology is a
humour-heavy dating simulator starring all the planets of our
solar system as patrons of a space lounge, where the player works
as a bartender-in-training. your roll is to get to know the
planets and make drink to their liking.
Over the course
of the game, you develop your relationships with these planets,
and expand your skills as a bartender with more complex drinks
Design Goals
Humour
Comedic storytelling for a easy-going but engaging experience
Deduction
Extract information from dialogue to inform actions
Agency
Make meaningful choices that change the direction of the story
Process
Making players get invested
from
the start of making this, we wanted to make it unique in both
story and gameplay.
we created interesting characters
with unique backgrounds, added heavily branching dialogue
between the player and the planets, and a mini game that would
tie into the planets interests so they are able to grow
closer.
in doing all this, we hoped that the players
could relate closer to at least one of the planets and capture
their heart throughout the game
Design Focused
While making the game, it was determined that we would
need to focus on making the system as design friendly as
possible so that writers can easily test the story and writing
they were creating.
this involved directly assigning
values in the writing of the story by panel so that if certain
branches were reached, the correct values would be used.
Learning the tools
For this game,
we had started with a basic need of a dating sim. as we
progressed, we wanted to include more interesting elements of
gameplay that would use all our team members talents and
interests.
this came to needing to use and learn
multiple tools. one of my roles in this was trying to make them
all work together. getting Inkle, and Bolt to talk to the
scripts to be able to output and change values as needed was
necessary for all elements to function in sync so we could set
values into the Inkle files to be checked in Bolt. as well as
finding an easy way to get the Inkle files into unity so writers
can add stories they created with ease with the variables they
need set
But we wanted to use these tools so that
those with limited programming abilities could still adjust and
change what they needed and also have an easy way to display and
control the test on screen.
Takeaways
As this was one of the teams first larger games, we found the
importance of proper documentation of processes, and information
and keeping it all up to date. even in smaller teams, losing track
of things was very easy.
this also showed how finding
the right tools for the work needed was also of importance as some
of them ended up being unnecessary and we spent hours trying to
make something work when another could do it better and we ended
up switching to use that one instead