Jacking out.

I created a “cyber-café” yesterday, for the two-player part of Bientôt l’été. Removed the characters, the wooden table, the drawer, the chess pieces and replaced the scene by an abstract grid with chess piece icons. It didn’t work. When we play-tested among ourselves, we just missed the realistic feel too much.

Players will just have to accept that the realistic look is just a lie of sorts. They won’t be able to look around, or see much of the characters, or put their hands on the table. The interaction is rigid and systematic, despite of the realistic look. But the scene feels nicer to us this way than a purely abstract screen.

The cyber-café game was interesting, though. I changed the interaction so that the quotes from Marguerite Duras that you collected on the beach, are more connected to the chess pieces you find near mysterious “apparitions”. So we’re going to keep that, for now. Playing a sort of unruly chess game as interface to a conversation is fun.

Though I hate having to design interactions at this point. It’s a very time consuming process and hard to schedule.