Week 9: Birb? Birb.

Research Results

So now that I have three games worth of data, here’s a whole summary of everything as well as a few conclusions.

– OMORI featured two main routes based on a decision made at the start of the game, as well as multiple endings due to choices near the end of the game. It scored a 2.466667 / 3, with most people praising the different routes and endings for being engaging.

– Library of Ruina featured a series of two choices at the end, where answering both choices in a certain way unlocks a series of fights that leads to the true ending. However, by unlocking the true ending, the cutscenes for the other endings can also be viewed in a cutscene viewer. It scored a 2.2 / 3. However, this one is probably the most questionable score, because I was only able to collect a few reviews for this game that actually discussed the endings.

– Night in the Woods featured many dialogue choices that did not have an impact on the game’s overall story, as well as a choice of who to hang out with that affects dialogue at the end of the game. It scored a 2.1818182 / 3, with most people mentioning the fact that the different choices present make the game rather replayable and the dialogue choices are interesting.

From these results, it seems that the more interactions that affect the ending, the higher the score. OMORI has by far the most interactions that affect the ending, and has a higher score than both of the other games by 0.3. Ruina and Night in the Woods have a similar amount of interactions that affect the ending, and they scored a similar score. However, Ruina scored slightly higher, though whether or not Ruina’s score is actually accurate is mildly debatable.

It seems that what people enjoy the most is seeing a game that has many interactions that affect the ending of the game, while also being replayable due to different content being locked behind certain other playthroughs. As such, our game will feature different interactions that all affect the ending, based on how you interact with monsters and how many journal entries you collect.

Progress This Week

Speaking of journal entries, I spent most of my time planning dialogue and journal entries. Basically, how game progression will work is that by interacting with certain objects, Raven can unlock different journal entries, which talk about her past experiences. I’ve basically just been writing out what should appear for these journals, and also planning out dialogue between Raven and her bird companion Poe. Please check Isabelle’s blog for Poe, who is the most adorable little bean in existence and I love him with all my heart. He’s just a lil birb guy. Except he has a horrible attitude but that’s fine because it’s funny.

Other than that, I’ve also been working on implementing a battle system. So what we’ve decided is to go with a system where the monster has an internal value that changes based on the player’s responses. If the player makes good responses, the value decreases, and if the player makes bad responses, the value increases. There is a cap on either side of the value, where reaching this value signifies the battle end. Depending on which cap is reached, though, the outcomes of the battle will differ. Since our battle system is somewhat similar to our dialogue system, I should be able to create a UI for it and implement its functions next week.

Up Next Week

I’ll probably continue writing and planning dialogue, but I’ll also spend time implementing our battle system. I’ll try my best to finish the battle system up next week, just so we have more time for random touch-ups and actual story implementation.