This is an excerpt from a document originally created at the end of my co-op block where I explain what happened during development and where I wanted the next Web Team to take the project.

Post-Production Follow-up

Although a lot of time has passed between the creation of this document and now (about three months as of writing this), Kirsten’s Experience hasn’t deviated too heavily from our initial plans for it. We had a very clear vision of what we wanted, and managed to faithfully create as much of that vision as we could within the allotted time-frame (barring a few hiccups).

One thing that’s almost exactly the same as when we planned it is the narrative. The experience is still a whimsical platforming romp through a child’s fantasy wonderland. It’s still undecided if this is supposed to be a dream or if it’s supposed to be more of Kirsten’s mind-palace, with the latter option requiring a much more focused vision moving forward. We also never got a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or whatever from Weez in regards to anything narratively about the experience, so we highly recommend meeting with Weez on that front before continuing any design/narrative work.

Our gameplay is also largely the same as what we initially envisioned it, albeit scoped down. After spending a week or so working on the previous incarnation of the experience, we came to the conclusion that the physics/collision engine being used only worked on still-models, which would have severely limited our options for platforming segments. Because of this, we decided to rebuild the engine for the experience one final time from the ground up so that the infrastructure would be able to handle adding in all of those different hazards and set-pieces. Because of that, we were only able to implement moving and rotating platforms. This ended up working out in the end though, as we also decided to cut down the length of our level from 4-6 platforming segments to only 2. This was to keep things consistent with the other experiences, which are each only about 3-5 minutes.

Our artistic and audio directions remained similar to our initial concepts, though we leaned much more into the fantastical and whacky nature of the experience. Our ‘doodle’ aesthetic seemed to be a big hit with playtesters, so we kept that and leaned into it by choosing much more vibrant pastels (see the exact hexadecimal colors to the right) to add to the whimsy of the world, and also to tie it into her character  more (as the art team said her main colors were purples). Keeping things in line with our updated palette, we also decide to lean into the wackiness with our SFX. We chose to use cartoony noises in just the right places to further push towards fantasy and away from the more realistic.

Overall, we’re really happy with the way things ended up panning out during our development cycle here. Most of the core experience is finished, and we were able to push way past the MVP for it. All that’s left for future teams to do is aesthetic or visual based, a lot of which can be copied or built upon from the pre-existing code. It’s HIGHLY recommended that you change little to nothing about the experience if you choose to continue working on it. For one thing, changing any of the physics could break the balancing of the platforming, which took a while to implement. Second though, is that the Kirsten experience has been in development for a long time due to every team deciding to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up. We ended up being partially guilty of that too (though we definitely didn’t plan to gut most of the back-end), so please don’t make the same mistakes that we did!