Prototyping Journal Entry

This early playable prototype is focused on showcasing the game's basic movement/platforming. It does not contain much outside of that as my focus was dedicated to making sure the game's core felt good and responsive, something that is important to ensure that the rest of the game is effectively on top of this movement. The only other thing in this prototype is a slightly revamped version of Unreal Engine's Third-person starter map, which has been changed to allow for better testing and exploration of the game's movement. I chose to use Unreal Engines Third person temple for much of this prototype as it already housed the framework for this kind of game saving me from needing to reinvent the wheel in a few cases.

Feedback from an initial concept document demonstrated that players really liked the concept of the game. Which helped confirm to me that I  was heading in the right direction for the game's movement. It also helped me solidify the idea that stealth theming of the game, would not only need to be present in the game's characters and environment, but also it's movement, If I'm not careful the theme will end up feeling more like a gimmick instead of a theme.

As mentioned already this prototype is fairly small in scope, but creating this first prototype has proven to be very useful. The game simply would never feel right, if the platforming, which is the core of the game at the end of the day, wasn't done well. Given the nature of the game, it was important that every available option to the player not only worked well and felt like they flowed into each other, but was also a meaningful option. Creating this prototype helped reveal one of the unnecessary options, the grounded dive. It was a fun idea, but after getting everything together, I quickly realized that within the player's toolkit, it occupied the same space as the double jump did, really only proving to be useful in the same situations in which a double jump would be. So I dropped the idea, I could have removed the double jump, but its versatility alongside its synergy with the air dive made it much more valuable to this project.