This week, our team focused on creating the Tech Demo and GDD for our game.

For the Tech Demo, our group focused on the Granny Tool minigames. Minigames were a recent development for the design of our game, meant to add more gameplay elements to the already existing stealth loop we were planning for our game, while also adding an element of “uniqueness” and leaning into the grandma theming of our game. 

Minigames are as they sound–a small side game that interrupts gameplay temporarily. These minigames pop up when the player uses a Granny Tool, and each minigame reflects the tool being used. For example, when deploying the Cat Granny Tool to distract NPCs, the player must pet the cat to satisfaction for it to obey their command. Otherwise, the player will struggle to deploy the Cat and have to try again. Our design intent for this was to add another unique aspect to our gameplay loop and give it something that differentiates itself from being "just a stealth game". Additionally, as our team is very 2D artist heavy, we decided for the minigames to be 2D and for that to convey the action of the grandma character, rather than worry about doing 3D animations of using the Granny Tools.

The reason our team focused on the Minigames is because we wanted to tackle the technical challenge to figure out how to create two scenes of gameplay. The gameplay changes from the overworld stealth missions to simplistic quick-paced minigames, which poses the question of how to host a game within a game. Because all the different minigames have different controls and goals, our team had to design different types of gameplay that were 1. distinct 2. fit in with the control scheme and 3. fit in with our current game systems. Our designers, programmers, and artists worked hard to figure out how to make these minigames function for our Tech Demo.

This week, a lot of changes happened in terms of design and game direction. While the core experience stayed the same, we solidified a lot of our design and figured out the more minute details of our gameplay. For example, instead of doing a level-by-level game experience, we swapped to one large map sectioned into multiple minisections. We thought this better suited our goals and overall game feel better, and helped lead the direction of our level design. Additionally, we solidified certain design choices like the Granny Tools, possible item interactions, different types of NPC behavior, etc. etc. These changes are reflected and properly documented in our GDD.