Welcome to the first dev log for Pirate's Dilemma! Here we'll be sharing our updates on the project from it's inception until now. Let's dive right in!

Idea Update

Over the past two weeks, we've been meeting multiple times as a team to discuss the idea behind our game, and theorize about where the fun might come from. The initial idea was to have the game be a 4-player free-for-all, but after building a prototype and doing some play testing, we realized that it's much harder to encourage players to collaborate and sabotage each other with this many individual agents.

The footage from the playtest can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vY-Frr_sRxYxvzo6GNz3Rku8qFHJ6zSh/view?usp=shari... Our main takeaways from this playtesting session are:

1) Player's don't understand the appeal of sabotaging, and it turns out that sabotaging is not worth your while unless all players are doing it. Why should I take a score hit to spend time sabotaging while other unaffected players are stacking up their own scores? It's a net disadvantage. Our game is essentially a collective action problem, which means that it's in each individual's best interest to focus on themselves. This is bad for a game that's trying to encourage emergent social gameplay and strategy! 

2) It was unclear to players what the boat capacity was for. Player's thought it was a goal they had to reach, and were surprised when exceeding the capacity ended up sinking the boat. Also player's didn't understand what their sabotage actions were doing, as it was unclear who's gold was on which boat. This intentional hiding of information was not incentive enough for players to pay attention to each other as we had hoped.

Overall, we discovered issues with the core idea. We needed to pivot quickly and try something else. The solution we came up with was to try the game as a 2v2 team-based game (this solves problem 1, as now it's worth your while to sabotage the other team, as there are only two "agents" in our collective action problem) and make each boat assigned to one of the teams (this solves problem 2, as now it's clear who's boat you're sabotaging). 

With this 2v2 idea, we were inspired by some of the levels in overcooked that require players to split up and perform seperate tasks to be as efficient as possible. The simplest example of this is the first level in overcooked, pictured below. 

In this level, players need to grab onions (top left) then chop them (bottom left) then add them to the stew (top right) then put the stew on a plate (bottom right). Because of the opening on the right, players aren't forced to cooperate, as they can access everything by themselves if they want to. However, players will likely notice that if they split up the tasks with one player on the top half of the map and one player on the bottom half of the map, they can do everything much more efficiently. Encouraging players to set up their own "assembly line" to accomplish a task was an idea that we really liked, and we took inspiration for this when designing our test level for the 2v2 game mode, pictured below. 

The idea is similar with this level. Players can do the entire run from the gold pile to the boat themselves, but they'll hopefully notice that they can do things more efficiently by assigning one player to the boat side of the white wall and another to the gold side, and have the gold side player throw the gold over the wall to their teammate. we're hoping that the team that figures this out first will have an advantage, and hopefully the other team will start copying them. 

We're doing our first playtest of this level at the game design and development club today, so we'll see how that, and the 2v2 game, goes!

Art Updates

The artists on the team have been hard at work putting together assets for the initial game! 

Vanessa has been hard at work on the model for our first character "Cap'n Claw". We've decided on a cell shaded look for the game, and so far it looks great with the tests we've done in blender!

Sergei has been working on a model for the boats in the game that looks great!

Iulia has created some cool tentacles for a Kraken character that we have in the works, which will show up and disrupt the gameplay!

Nick has been hard at work on a treasure chest, which will eventually replace the gold pile:

And Lene has been working on mockups for the UI of the main menu!

Also, Connor's been exploring a shader for the water:

We're all really stoked about the way the game's look is coming together! More updates to come soon!