HW8: Tetrad for Group Game

1. Tetrad

• Story - Our story is very simple, the idea is that you are some sort of space explorer and have docked with a strange alien ship and have become trapped with your crew being killed off. The player must survive their way of the ship
• Aesthetics - The aesthics are meant to be very dark, strange, alien, with somewhat fast pace theme music to give the player a sense of urgency. The sound effects are meant to be somewhat "harsh" or "cold.".
• Mechanics - The mechanics are very simple. The user is meant to use the two sticks on an appropriate controller (though keyboard is available) and use the left stick to move and the right stick to rotate/fire. The user simply runs around, killing enemies, and navigating challenges and puzzles, avoiding obstacles such as fire, acid, and laser barriers.
• Technology - The technology we utilized was the powerful unreal engine and the target platform was the PC. We used several free assets provided by Epic.

2. Balance

 The balance of the game is between its extremely simple mechanics and enemies that individually are simple to defeat but the player, if she is not careful, can quickly be overrun by too many enemies. As well, our puzzles have balance in that they are challenging yet solvable. In our laser barrier room, we implemented a puzzle based on looking at puzzles from other challenging games (though generally very simple, primitive, aesthetics). However, in our final product, we may have increased the speed and amount of enemies too greatly, reducing the level of balance.

3. Emergent Properties

There are not many emergent properties except in a few cases the user may be able to solve the problems in ways that we did not direct or intend the user to solve them..

4. Interest Curves

There is a lot of pacing in this game, again probably due to it being very story driven. There are moments of intense action followed by respites of going around and exploring any learning new details via dialogues with various unsavory characters you may meet.

5. Enjoyment

If we reduced the amount of enemies, I think the game can be rather enjoying as the simple mechanic makes it very satisfying to dispatch the enemies. The puzzles give a nice respite to the action.