Education

This week is about education.
The education in the first 3 levels is very important. The player needs to understand how to think like the philosopher thinks in order to succeed in the trolley levels. As of right now it seems like it will be hard to know for sure if we have given the player enough information/the right information for them to complete the levels successfully. This is something we will know more about as people play the game.
But as far as we can know we have the information that we think the player needs to know about each philosophy for the first 3 levels. So the problem is that we know what we want the player to know and when, but we do not know exactly how to tell the player what they need to know.
At first we thought about just explicitly telling the player each thing they needed to know, but then we kept getting stuck on the wording and keeping with the story. We tossed this idea back and forth for a while.

And then we consulted someone else who suggested we tell the player a few attributes of the philosopher and they show a sliding scale with a marked ideal range while they play the level and have each action affect the scale. The plan is that the player would then be able to modify his/her actions to keep the scale in the right place and in this way get an intuitive understanding of each philosophy.
This seems like a good idea so we are going to make it and if it does not work out well we will find a new plan for education. Currently I am working on using the list of attributes of each philosophy to create categories for the sliding scales. Ideally by next week I will have the categories and scales finished with an idea of where each philosophy stands in each.

The other thing on my mind this week is style. Style seems important and deciding the style of the game seems like a daunting task  that we will have to stick with forever. I know that is not the case, but it seems to be the feeling that is stopping me from developing the style of the game. So the secondary mission for next week is to decide and sketch the style. It is time to commit so the game can develop further.

thank you, that is all