The House of Tesla Dev Log #2
Good everyone!
Today we are going to talk about game design, but as always you are free to just scroll to see the pretty stuff (and this time even some… eh… just stuff). It’s really hard to talk about this topic because a large part of the process is highly subjective, so take anything I tell you here with a grain of salt, or a few just to be sure.
After initial brainstorming and the creation of an outline of the core story, the main part of the game designer’s job begins. In our case, it means we already know how many chapters the game will have and what should happen in each of them.
The next phase is all about research. We scour the internet, related museums, relevant movies, biographies, and news articles (for some of us this also means studying hardcore scholarly articles and textbooks on physics). And then we start building the flow of the chapter piece by piece.
Each piece starts as an idea – either we want to make a specific type of puzzle or we want to use a specific object, invention, or concept. So let me use an example. For one specific story-related reason (which I am not gonna spoil – booo, I know) we wanted to have a model of Wardenclyffe Tower and for it to be an important object during the gameplay, so one small puzzle wasn’t enough for us. In the end, there are at least three separate puzzles and some interactions as part of this model.
With few ideas like these, it is quite easy to chain the events and interactions into a meaningful flow that will hopefully feel rewarding and point the player bit by bit toward the goal of our narrative.
After this, you might think we are done. Well, that is very much not so. We need to take all these ideas and we need to make them into a form that will be understandable not only to us (!) but to everyone who works on this stuff after us – so basically everyone in the whole company. During this part of the process, we generate so much text that it could fill several books – that said, you wouldn’t want to read them, nobody would.
On an unrelated note: do you know what happens when you experiment with gravity in Blender (3d software), when you don’t really work with Blender?
That’s it for today and next time you can look forward to learning a bit about our plans on the game visuals. Feel free to let us know if there is anything specific you like to know more about. Of course, there is stuff we have to keep a secret at least until release, but we will try our best to accommodate requests.
Viktor
Lead Designer of The House of Tesla
Blue Brain Games
Today we are going to talk about game design, but as always you are free to just scroll to see the pretty stuff (and this time even some… eh… just stuff). It’s really hard to talk about this topic because a large part of the process is highly subjective, so take anything I tell you here with a grain of salt, or a few just to be sure.
After initial brainstorming and the creation of an outline of the core story, the main part of the game designer’s job begins. In our case, it means we already know how many chapters the game will have and what should happen in each of them.
The next phase is all about research. We scour the internet, related museums, relevant movies, biographies, and news articles (for some of us this also means studying hardcore scholarly articles and textbooks on physics). And then we start building the flow of the chapter piece by piece.
Each piece starts as an idea – either we want to make a specific type of puzzle or we want to use a specific object, invention, or concept. So let me use an example. For one specific story-related reason (which I am not gonna spoil – booo, I know) we wanted to have a model of Wardenclyffe Tower and for it to be an important object during the gameplay, so one small puzzle wasn’t enough for us. In the end, there are at least three separate puzzles and some interactions as part of this model.
With few ideas like these, it is quite easy to chain the events and interactions into a meaningful flow that will hopefully feel rewarding and point the player bit by bit toward the goal of our narrative.
After this, you might think we are done. Well, that is very much not so. We need to take all these ideas and we need to make them into a form that will be understandable not only to us (!) but to everyone who works on this stuff after us – so basically everyone in the whole company. During this part of the process, we generate so much text that it could fill several books – that said, you wouldn’t want to read them, nobody would.
On an unrelated note: do you know what happens when you experiment with gravity in Blender (3d software), when you don’t really work with Blender?That’s it for today and next time you can look forward to learning a bit about our plans on the game visuals. Feel free to let us know if there is anything specific you like to know more about. Of course, there is stuff we have to keep a secret at least until release, but we will try our best to accommodate requests.
Viktor
Lead Designer of The House of Tesla
Blue Brain Games