During my senior year at ArtCenter College of Design in my game design course, for one of our Individual game Projects, we'd been tasked with creating a game idea, conceptual prototype, and design documents around an original IP. These series of developer diaries are my progress on Nuts & Volts from concept to a small prototype displaying the world of the game and its promise in tandem with design documents for any mechanics I was unable to get in within the 4 weeks of in-engine development
Week 1 (10/31/22 - 11/04/22) + Week 2 (11/07/22 - 11/11/22) When looking to pitch a new game IP, I had to think about what constraints I was dealing with and how create an idea that would succeed and be well-fleshed out within a short time-frame. I knew a couple of things regarding my IP from the get-go. I wanted to make a buddy-cop like game with the pillars of unique character design diversity and include customization and crafting. So I started from there, looking at successful games and other media that were successful in the aspects of the game I wanted to be my foundation that I could draw inspiration from and put my own spin on it.
I looked towards games like Ratchet and Clank and the movie Robots for inspiration for a good buddy-cop relationship between two characters, both of which had the main distinction that in each duo, either character served their own purpose, Ratchet is different from Clank as Rodney is different from Wonder-Bot. Regarding customization and crafting, I looked at the Dead Rising series whose zany weapon creations incited fun from me as a player when played before and served inspiration in design regarding fun in player agency.
I began to compile these ideas into a Executive Summary and Game Design Document that I would flesh out over the next week.
Week 3 (11/14/22 - 11/18/22)
This is when development in-engine had actually begun. I began to think about the scope of what I would showcase in order to conceptually show the world and gameplay of loop of Nuts & Volts, settling on the base gameplay loop of Exploration - exploring the world of the Wastelands with the playable characters, Diverse Characters - solving puzzles as both Nuts & Volts, which each of them serving their own unique purpose (Nuts being more Analog-oriented and Volts more technological-based tasks), and Customization - seeing players being able to collect various scraps and parts for their rocket and customizing it how they see fit.
When starting off in-engine, I wanted to get down any modular systems that would be used throughout the prototype's duration, creating rudimentary systems for the base character controllers and character switching managers, NPC dialogue interactions, as well as a quest manager that was able to detect and complete four quest types.
Travel - Required players or specified character to travel to a marked location
Talk - Required players to talk to a specified NPC to gain context on the quest
Objective - Required players to complete a specific task (ex: Powering Engines, Building Rocket)
Collection - Required players to complete an objective a certain amount of times before being marked as completed (ex: Search 7 Dumpster Piles, Defeat 3 Junk-Rats)
Earliest Iteration of Gameplay Systems mainly showcasing the Quest Manager
Week 4 (11/21/22 - 11/25/22)
My second week of development was spent taking the rudimentary systems I had made and creating a small world that utilized them, and creating a small end-to-end experience that would encapsulate the base gameplay loop. During this stage I did a lot of world building and blockout as well as contextualizing different puzzles I wanted the player to complete such as combat-based ones and power-puzzles. A lot of leg work got done during this week but a lot of polish to go from fixing gameplay bugs to needing to include audio and visual polish to make the feedback feel more impactful for players.
Week 5 (11/28/22 - 12/02/22)
This developer diary marks the last week of development on Nuts & Volts, where a majority of dev time had been spent raising the visual and audio polish of the game from previously received feedback as well as fixing any major bugs and fixes such as the NavMesh Pathing for my AI and tweaking the player controller cameras to not clip. The video presented below is a sizzle showing off the world and state of play of Nuts & Volts!
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