Extroverts
Hello there Introverts! In today’s Devlog we would like to talk about extroverts, which you will need to avoid if you want to beat the game! We hope this will give you some insight into our intentions when creating the “villain” characters.
Our main idea was to create an introverted character that would avoid extroverts! It was really important for us from the start to avoid making the extroverts antagonistic or “villains,” as we didn’t want to be more mean-spirited than intended. Our extroverts are not evil - just different.
Some extrovert abilities were designed to be beneficial to the player, while some were designed to be beneficial/detrimental depending on the situation, and based on whether the player has eye contact or not. A few extroverts were designed to be purely a detrimental obstacle.
The extroverts were created from two sources - what the game needs, and what we think would be funny. Some extroverts started first as a purely mechanical challenge, with no real contextualization as a particular character or behavior. In those cases, we’d try to contextualize the challenge as a specific extrovert after prototyping the ability thoroughly.
In other cases, the idea of the extrovert came to us in a “complete” state, where both the mechanical behavior and the extrovert’s appearance, animations, etc. were clear from the start. The Salesman and his teleport ability was one of those cases.
We wanted to try and make most of the extroverts funny and unexpected, and as such, our extroverts usually have “surprising” abilities that still fit within the stereotype they fill.
It is also worth mentioning that your character regains social battery by petting animals in the levels, who also function as checkpoints!
Fun fact - If you pay attention to the faces of the characters in the game, you’ll find a common thread: the introverts have their mouths hidden, while the extroverts have their eyes hidden. A few characters are ambiverts (both introverted and extroverted), and have both visible eyes and mouths.
Thank you for your time, we hope that you like the next steps in the development of our game!
See you in the next Devlog!