Devouree Dev Vlog [Concept Postmortem]

Hey guys! So, the Pirate Game Jam is over, so I'd just like to go over this game, and how we did, how we did it, and what we do about it going forward.

(You can play it here) https://redogna.itch.io/devouree 

Concept

So, in a game jam, you're given a theme and a certain amount of time to finish a game. The theme was Alchemy and Shadow. I only had 5 to 6 days to finish, so I was left scrambling with how to incorporate the concept. In my mind, I had in image of an alchemist feeding you to the shadows to produce some sort of elixir, and so, "Devouree" was born.

(There's the devourer, and devouree. In this case, the people in the house were it. It sounds funny, but I kinda just rolled with it. Idk.)

The whole Game Design Document is in this link : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B-tIh19q_izjdvcF8h15WATjPFoAgBXEW1pGHIDTo7w/edit?usp=sharing This doc has all the plans, and concepts. It's a fast read. I only made it coz of the Game Jam requirements. But for reference, I'll be making one of these for bigger projects - I guess for feasibility and review sake. You may peruse to your hearts content, and I guess judge if we made it "As written". (Lmao, we did and we didn't)

Stupid Pride, Great System, Wholly Incomplete

Guys, I really wanted to be clever. Okay. Clever. I didn't have to make it this way but my stupid pride wanted to make a good "system" game. (What do you mean by that?) What I mean by that is that, I wanted to make something that was a little bit harder to come up with. Something with a complicated system under the hood. It's be re-debut into game development after all and I wanted to do something that was a little harder than an arcade type game. (basically the first things you learn making games). 

 It's far from a technical marvel by any means. I'm not that good. But it was actually a huge undertaking for me. 

 Did I execute it well? Yes, kinda. It ran with no hiccups and bugs. Which it had a lot at the beginning. But that's technical and structural. 

 The question is : How was the concept executed overall?

The concept of "The Prisoner's Dilemma" game that I fixated on, I think I executed correctly on a technical aspect. I dropped people in a room, to do a battle royale "voting" where the lowest 2 scores get eliminated per round. It functioned correctly. I also feel like not implicitly saying how the score system worked in the game's favor but never really translated to how to play it.

There wasn't really any context apart from text on what to do and why we're voting and betraying. This was the most common critique. I KNOW how the game works in my head, but if it doesn't translate to the player or if there isn't any explicit explanation on how to do it, then ultimately it wasn't a good game.

It may have left a player feeling like the game was RNG based. More on that later.

The Two Oversights

When creating this game, two things did not even cross my mind.

Optimizing The Strategy

Two things which made this game borderline unexciting, was the tendency for humans to "Optimize" a game.

When Nat played this game, he found that he wanted to "Trust/Cooperate" more, because if you're locked in with strangers, why the heck would you not cooperate. But he found out that "Betraying" was likely gonna get you out and make you win. No Incentive That desire to just optimize a way out was a human thing, and because there really was no incentive to cooperate, after all, everyone gets knocked out, so in the logic of the game "It's everyone for themselves".  

The prisoner's dilemma was a way to model competition and cooperation, and create a microcosm of bigger complex things going on in society, and for me to just miss out on incentivizing COOPERATION, the fundamental mechanic in the game, was a super misfire on my end.

Supposing there was another way. We changed the fundamental rules of the game. Maybe we made a system for them to tell their life stories, and maybe we change the system to where no one has to die. That will garner sympathy for the other characters, and maybe betrayal won't be an automatic thing. --- I don't know what I'll do with this concept, considering I feel like it's half baked, but I feel like this still has a 2.0 patch ahead of it and maybe after that, I'll leave it be. Do you have any suggestions as to how I can make it better? Please do tell. --- Also, the breakdown is separated into 2 parts, because I have to leave soon and I have other work to attend to - but the 2nd part is about the inside of the game and the things I did underneath the hood. The "logic" behind this thing.

Thank you for reading this part of the breakdown. Catch ya later