This post is an extension of my previous post, as I’ve talked to my colleagues and I’ve been sent a couple more environments that could work for this project: Carnival, and Science Center/Museum. So I’m gonna take some time to look into these ideas and give their pros and cons!
Carnival
So, the carnival. The carnival’s strongest feature is the thematic through line presented by the attractions at the carnival. Similar to the playroom, each attraction of the carnival may have different mechanical functions, but they each strive for the same goal of being fun. And that’s great! We want this to be fun! I mean, yeah, we want this project to be a lot of different things, but the most important thing is to make this project engaging, and I think the best way to do that for this game is to make it fun!
That being said, this theme has a significant problem: it’s incredibly asset heavy. The fact that nearly each experience would need its own dedicated architecture is either going to be an economical or temporal burden. Not to say that any of these environments are asset light, but this one was notable, as is the next example!
Science Center/Museum
So yeah, the museum will also be asset heavy. Sure, and I’m not really even bringing this up for the sake of noting this (I have a different, bigger issue with this environment), it’s mainly just because I forgot to break down the asset cost of each environment in my previous post, so it’s really just me saying “Hey! I know things need assets, and assets are hard!”.
But what about the Science Center is great? Well, it elevates the maturity of the playroom without taking away the fun. It’s also indoors, which does come with its benefits, mainly having easily understandable paths of travel and boundaries to streamline the experience.
My main issue with this idea though, is the fact that the overall environment is dictated by the exhibits. This means that the assets and environments can’t really be generalized, instead the museum has to be broken into the exhibits and from there each exhibit needs their own asset list and share of the experiences.
Conclusion
And so we’re here again, at the end of another small breakdown of more environments I could use for the Basic Experience Comparisons. After some searching for assets on the Asset Store to see what could be possible just by using what’s already available the two environments I think work the best are the carnival and the park, but the playroom is a close third, as I really enjoy the idea of this environment being out in an open ended location. But my colleagues may have other ideas, so I look forward to bringing this up with them and breaking these environments down further.
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