Hello Everyone. My name is Brian and I am the other half of the programming team on Nurbits. Today I will take you through the design process of the first prototype for our game.
Once we settled on the pie slice game mechanic, I began prototyping what I thought it might look like as a basic step sequencer like puzzle game that relied heavily on the computer chip as neuron association outlined in our grant proposal. I began work with a chip model that had on it one of our 3 patterns of differing time scales. Here are the 3 pattern representations shown below, each with a different pattern, in yellow, that must be hit for a chip to reach its threshold to fire. The patterns not only represent the threshold that must be reached, but also the pattern of signals in which that chip fires on to whichever chip it is connected to.
Each chip also has a number of inputs on the left and an output “wire”, on the right, that could be hooked to another chips inputs. The example below shows a 16 beat pattern with two inputs.
To better show this I have made this below video to take you through a level of this prototype.
Creating this first prototype took less than a week, which may be clear if you made something unexpected happen in the demo, but it was very helpful not only for me to get my ideas out, but also for the team to have some starting point to critique and iterate on. This prototype was used as the jumping off point for some different gameplay ideas and some more prototypes to come. I hope you enjoyed this look into our development process and remember to keep a lookout for our next post and playable prototype.
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