Day # 5 ! Creativity is the way for players to customize their game experience, to make it more personal. Leaving mechanics that involve players’ sense of aesthetics, of art, is giving them a mic, encouraging them to sing : in one way, to express themselves.
Sometimes, those mechanics has nothing to do with the core gameplay but players tend to spend their precious time to… create !
Play the Interactive Study here : https://loganou974.itch.io/gms-day-5-creativity
This study was really a though one : A sandbox is really interesting when you can do a maximum of things with a minimum of tools. In a one day challenge, time management is valuable and it needed time to build some tools.
Furthermore, i was experimenting and had no concrete idea of where i wanted to go with this prototype. Initially, the entire system depended on the physics of the engine and I realized that to give too much freedom to the player, it was almost impossible to achieve something « beautiful » quickly or easily. The challenge is there: to make you want to create with tools accessible, ergonomic but which have a potential, a depth.
The thing is, you can hardly stop perfecting a tool when it comes to creativity. The last thing i added was the « # » module that snapped to the nearest Bumper.
Good reference : Electroplankton