Pillars of Life – Post Mortem

I still haven’t put together a time lapse; I’ve been busy playing and rating. But I still want to write a post mortem to elaborate on my goals and express what I feel I accomplished.

Topic is Shapeshift – 48 hours to go

Within an hour and a half of the beginning of the compo, I settled on the “caterpillar lifecycle” concept:

The goal was to create experientially different moments of play during the different phases of your caterpillar life. As the design sheet above depicts, an important early thought was creating a sense of freedom and openness when the player emerges as a butterfly. This was accomplished by providing wildly different controls after the player emerges from a cocoon.

(The player is immobile as a cocoon, but has the freedom to move the camera – something they couldn’t do as a Pillar. Being given a brief opportunity to scout the map is useful, and it serves as a cue for the player to make the control shift more intuitive.)

The loop was complete, and roughly balanced so that total population was dependent on player actions. Neat.

I hang out in the IRC chat for a few before some kind soul yells at me, “SLEEP!” (more…)