Vast was created with a group of 4 students for a 3 week game jam in the summer of 2020 during my 4th Semester at the university of applied science HTW Berlin. It is about the exploration of a barren and mysterious world, the construction of procedurally growing structures and the player setting their own goals to pursue.
Mechanics
Vast is a 1st person Singleplayer game with a basic movement set of running and jumping. It can be used to traverse through a from player influenced and ever changing world.
Furthermore the Player has an Orb with 5 different mechanics attached. They can swap the current Mode of the orb, charge it, throw it, teleport to the current location of it or it into their hands.
Depending of the current Mode of the Orb different kind of structures get created wherever it impacts. These structures grow with a slowly decaying growth speed for a set duration. By charging the Orb the player can increase the growth speed of said structures while also decreasing the duration of growth.
Another way to change the growth pattern of structure is to influence the flight duration of the orb. The longer it flies the more convoluted and intricate the structures get.
Gamefeel
Using the mechanics of Vast the player is in a constant cycle of shaping the world with new structures and exploring the player shaped world. While pursuing their self set goals they are quickly learning about their influence on the world and can
We wanted to give the player a feeling of might and control over the world that gradually turns into a feeling of awe while they discover the vast size of the desert.
Development
With the pressure of only 3 weeks time and a theme as big as procedural we started the Game Jam by setting us some constraints and goals for our game. We decided to not just procedurally generate a map in the background but instead to give the players mechanics to interact with the Algorithms and parameters of our procedural generation.
After setting a frame for ourselves we searched for a good core mechanic to fit within. Relatively fast we came up with the mechanic of an item to represent the interaction with different algorithms. So we started brainstorming about possible algorithms.
Now that we had finished the first draft for our core system we started with the development of our first prototype. We further used the prototype to experiment with different kinds of algorithms and Camera systems before settling on a 1st person system and 3 different growth pattern to further develop.
Parallel to the system and prototype development we gathered many different references to create a guide line for the visual style. We decided on a simplistic mix between rough cuboid shapes and a smooth terrain.
At some point during development we decided to have a digital playtesting session with another group of students. It helped us to refocus our limited resources on the important parts of the game and to reevaluate the gamefeel we were aiming for.
Key Learnings
Due to the Corona Pandemic the biggest obstacles during this game jams was the forced work in our home office. To make that possible I taught myself hot to use different tools to organize a digital workflow for example: BigBlueButton, Discord and Miro. I also learned about the different pros and cons of digital playtesting compared to analog ones.
