Mapatuo was my first 3D project as a Student of the HTW Berlin. It is a virtual toy with a simplistic and abstract visual style. The player uses Fun and easy to understand tools to build and play with their own version of the ever growing world of Mapatuo.
MAPATUO
Mechanics
The slowly but ever decaying world of mapatuo is filled with small groups of hendecahedrons which slowly fall apart. The player can shape and influence the decay with various tools. To give the player new ressources after a while new groups form and start falling all on their own.
The player can place their own hendecahedrons but they don't hold long before starting to fall. They can also attach hooks to the shapes, they don't do much on their own but they can be used for other tools.
Different hooks can be connected through rods to fixate them and to build elaborate networks between the hendecahedrons.
Hooks can also be magnetized to constantly attract all falling hendecahedrons. The player can use magnets to move his constructions in fascinating ways and when used right even build orbiting systems.
Development
Just like with our 2D projects out of the 2nd Semester we started the development by searching for a good core mechanic to build and expand on. This time it was lot harder. We had a lot of idfferent ideas that we cycled through but in the end an idea stuck of a world the player has to stop from falling apart.
With that idea in mind we made 3 different prototypes on how that could work. After a bit of further exploration we decided to go with my prototype of blocks that were just falling down and the player had to turn the world around to stop them from leaving the frame,
Almost immediately we realised we had to develop more tools for the player to keep them engaged and started experimenting with different toolsets. During that process we also recognized that the goal of keeping the blocks from falling was insufficient and started the search for a different objective.
With the help of our Professors we organized a playtesting session with game design students in their 1st semester. It was a great and helpful experience to see other players interact with our game system. The main observation we had was that no goal would please all the various playstyles of our game. Instead of taking away from the experience with a fixed goal we left it open for the player to decide what to do.
Without the problem of not having a goal out of the way we could focus our efforts on polishing the content instead of adding more. We experimented a lot with different shapes for our objects. Until we found the hendecaehedron which fulfills our criteria of an unconventional shape that tesselates but looks different from every side perfectly.
To create a distinct look without loosing it abstract feeling the last but definitely not least steps were to iterate a lot on our colorit and shaders. We wanted an experimental and visually pleasing style that wouldn't be tiresome to the eyes or to boring. In the end we settled on a fruity style with almost no hard edges in our shapes.
Key Learnings
In this project I learned how I could adapt my workflow to a different group of developers and how I can improve the quality of feedback during my presentations by directing the viewers attention on important topics. Furthermore I took with me the value of a playtesting session especially during a development phase of uncertainty. Our decision to omit the goal for Mapatuo taught me that in Game design sometimes less is more.