The mechanics in Maskerade can be divided into 3 diferents categories: movement, interaction and powers.
- Movement: Referred to the way the player can navigate the levels. These are walking, sneaking and running.
- Interaction: This mechanics includes all the ways the player can iteract with the world around them, including openening drawers, picking objects and observe them, among others.
- Power: These are the mechanics the player unlock along the game and have an impact on their navigation posibilities.
In my case, I was the principal responsible of the powers mechanics, of which only one can be seen in the playable demo.
Early design
Initially 2 guidlines were established in the design of the powers. The first one was to be related to a cat, because the source of the powers is the cat mask the protagonist wears and that transform her during the game. The second one was to not be aggresive or violent. By this we meant that the powers could not be used against enemies or help the player get rid of them.
With this in mind, my team and I designed 2 powers for the player: claws and hearing acuity. Both of them were designed to help the player access areas that were blocked before and find new secrets about the story. But various drawbacks were found mid-development for the hearing acuity.
- Easy to use: We wanted a power that were easy for players to understand and use at their advantage. But taking into account people with hearing difficulties, this was an hard problem for us to solve.
- Awarness of the power: Because this mechanic was an unlockable one, we needed a noticable change in the player perception of sound for them to understand that they could do something new in a certain location. For example, there was an idea of a room where a clock needed to be found. Before the power was unlocked, the clock ticking sound would be 2D, being imposible for the player to locate the origin of the sound. But once the hearing acuity obtained, the sound would turn 3D and now be searchable. So we needed to be sure the player would notice this change.
- Need for an HUD: The 2 previous problems could be solved with an HUD that showed the player the sound direction. First of all, an help like this could totally remove the player from having fun locating a sound only by ear. Secondly and more importantly, the player inmersion was a very important feature for us to keep, and we couldn’t find an HUD that didn’t reduced it greatly.
Because of this drawbacks, we decided to not include the hearing acuity power in the playable demo and focus on the claws one. Once the foundations had been laid for this power, I was the one charged with the rest of the development process.
Claws defintion
For the claws, I defined 2 uses which were unlocked at differents stages of evolution of the power:
- Climbing: This allow the player to climb specifics courtains of the Cabaret. At first these courtains are not useful for the player, but once the power is unlocked, they can be use to get in places that were unreachable before. I had to take into account that the power could be used near enemies, so how they interact with the player while climbing was also defined.
- Pick locking: In the Cabaret, some doors can be found that are closed, but can be opened using pick locking. When the player unlocks this use of the power, they can explore again areas from early on in the game and open door that were locked before.
During the playable demo, the protagonist transform 2 separate times. Before any transformation, the player does not have any power. With the first transformation, claws grow on the hands of the protagonist and the climbing use is available. With the second one, the pick locking use is unlocked.
Final state of powers
Once the programming department had finished creating the powers, I tested and implemented them into the game. However, because of planning issues, a lot of visual aspects of the claws that were defined could not be implemented. This included special courtains porp, special locks porp, animations and visual changes in the protagonist hands.
For this reason, what can be seen in the playable demo is a very rudimentary version of the claws power that archive only the functionality. Despite this, we succeed to enchance the player navigation and exploration with the powers and archived our original goal.
Documentation
By clicking in the following button you can see the documentation I created with the definition of the powers:
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