Capstone Post 2: Possessive Protection

Figure 1: Hugging a planet back together.

I'm excited with the thematic, feel-y direction our game has taken. After teetering between arcade and casual markets, we've reached a nice middle ground with a leaning towards casual. More importantly, we've nailed down a core experience we want the player to have: an abstraction of motherhood.

There are many types of play we as developers can craft for players. Combat games are quite common, but a lot of games that aren't directly about war can be seen as analogs for war: typically there is some sort of enemy force that you the player must defeat. Mario versus Bowser's minions, Leon Kennedy v zombies, Gordon Freeman v the Combine, etc. While this type of experience is tried and tested fun, with Serpent Shadows we are aiming for an experience that I haven't really seen before.

I think we are used to seeing a lot of masculine experiences in video games, and feminine experiences get chalked up to not a whole lot of fun. I'd like to keep masculine and feminine in the abstract: let's take a look at adjectives usually associated with these two genders:

I think games largely lean towards the masculine side: in characters, in theme, in challenges: most elements of popular games lean heavily towards masculinity. While there is always some crossover, somewhere along the way we decided that masculine energy is more fun to have in video games than feminine energy. 

What we are trying to accomplish with Serpent Shadows is not a game marketed towards women, but rather a game that puts the player into a character radiating with feminine energy, with challenges and rewards that are very feminine in nature.

In the game, you play as a dragon with this long tail flying around its little solar system, protecting the planets that reside in it. When arrows hit your planets, the glass casing around them shatters, leaving them unprotected. In this state their "bubble," so to speak, is broken and they venture out of the solar system until you come along and encircle them, "hugging" their protective bubbles back. The underlying idea here is that you are a mother figure to these planets; protecting them from harm by using your own body as a shield.

So, without outright saying it, we want the player to, on a more unconscious level, be playing a game that is an analog for a specific type of protective parenting. Our design choices moving forward will revolve around this idea. We will probably make it so you can create planets by encircling yourself, and a planet will be born from your tail, severing your tail. This works both thematically and mechanically: your tail is shorter so it's harder to defend your planets, but you have another planet. Many, many iterations have brought us to this mode of play, and I have to say I'm excited to see where we go with it!