Dev Log #4 (June 6th-12th)

(Above: Work in Progress of build mechanics)

My Grandma’s A Hitman has gone through some major design changes in the past week. Based on last week’s presentations, we’ve taken a lot of the criticism and advice that we got to heart and have reconsidered a lot of the aspects of our game. The two big points of consideration we tackled were scope and game identity.

Our changes for scope coincide with our lack of game identity. As we were overcompensating for our lack of “uniqueness” and “grandma-esque” designs, we ended up adding a lot of extra mechanics to our game. Our original concept, which was Hitman-esque, was already a lot of work from what other people saw, so as our game kept growing, more people became concerned with our scope. While we considered scope very important at the start of our design process and took steps to specifically manage our ideas, as we became more concerned with our game’s identity, our original design changed in ways that were unsustainable for a final scope. Thus, part of our direction change was to also salvage the scope of our game too.

Our biggest concern was our game’s identity. Much of the critique we got back in the past weeks was about our game not really getting the “grandma” theming across, or when it did, it simply felt like a stealth game mechanic with a grandma-themed skin over it. Our team struggled a lot with trying to figure out how to take advantage of our game theme, as it was difficult to create a stealth game without taking strong inspiration from games of similar genre. As we struggled to capture the “Grandma” theming of the game alongside trying to give our game its own unique identity, we ended up adding more and more to our game which did not solve our identity issue, but lost our original scope as well. Because of how unguided our design felt, we decided to redesign the main mechanics of our game and started from the top. 

Our main game loop relies on two Granny Tools now: Yarn Traps and Knitting Needle Distractions. Yarn Traps are traps laid by the player character setting down a line of yarn between two walls. If an enemy walks into a yarn trap, they are incapacitated. Knitting Needles are thrown to distract the enemy, causing them to run in its direction. The two mechanics together will be used to stealth around the level and get rid of enemy NPCs to progress. The goal now requires the player to get to the end of the level and get deeper into the enemy base without being caught. Suspicion is less of a mechanic now, as being caught equal to a gameover now, as there’s no slowly increasing bar. 

For our build, we had a lot of work cut out for us. Because we had to start from scrap with our main mechanics, we decided to have our first level showcase only one of the Granny Tools. We chose the Yarn Trap to focus on for this deliverable. Our programmers re-coded the player controller and NPCs to better suit our new gameplay, as well as polishing them up. We added a Tool HUD to our game depicting the two different Granny Tools, as well as the ability to swap between the two (though the Knitting Needle is not functional yet). Finally, we added the Yarn Traps. Yarn Traps are primarily functional, and can be used to eliminate hostile NPCs that run into them. The player can cancel the creation of and dismantle Yarn Traps. Additionally, a new level graybox was created to showcase our mechanics, alongside a few 3D model assets (animations still a work-in-progress).