It’s been a long time with no update, which is because we decided to start doing devlogs on a milestone basis. Our first milestone, our midterm build, was like two weeks ago, but then we went to GDC, then slept a lot, then started making the game again, then remembered we had to write devlogs.
I’m going to break this devlog down super simple style. Bullet points and headers, until the final section where I have to use my words more. Starting with the midterm build we made a couple weeks ago!
What we changed/made for our midterm build:
- Fully implemented time passage, but NPCs don’t have real schedules yet, they just get animated in the timeline
- Full first draft script for days 1-3
- Rocks can get thrown and placed out of the pouch UI
- I added a rock encyclopedia against Winnie’s orders
- Forum posts to read each night at the end of the day
- A bunch of “canon” events, like playtime, seeing the body at the end of the first day, and Mimi getting taken away by the detective at the end of the third day
- DMing with your bestie at the end of the third day
- Sticker “reaction” feedback when you leave a sticker on someone’s status
- Restructured a bunch of stuff around scriptable objects, which are awesome. Generally implemented a bunch of stuff that we’ve been talking about for a long time but never did.
Feedback that we got:
We got lots of feedback on our build, which I think can be boiled down mostly to the first point below. I think our professors must have forgotten about the compiment sandwich thing, so it was a pretty blunt feedback session, but was of course still really helpful in evaluating the game!!
- Many of our professors noted a lack of direction, and nothing to do.
- Eric was confused about the little sticker reactions that pop up when you react to someone’s status, even though he was the one that suggested it. But I do think he’s right, it’s confusing lol.
- Winnie said that it’s not super clear that time passes, since we hide the clock most of the time.
- My own personal note: Throwing and dropping rocks doesn’t feel that good. It’s cool that if you fling them out of your bag they fly out into the world, but I’m left wishing I could have more control, that I wouldn’t just fling rocks on the 2D plane that I’m standing on, and that the experience of dropping rocks was way more fluid.
GDC
We spent the week of March 9-13 at GDC! Apparently they had record low numbers, but the lines for talks were insane, and the talks were super enlightening! I guess the main reason people go is for the networking, and I did get to talk to some cool people, most of which.. i could probably just talk to.. here in new york (like AP & Jenny). BUT the star of the show for me was really the talks. Here are some of the talks I went to and my (relevant to this project) thoughts.
- A talk about Wanderstop by lead designer Steven Margolin, in which they discussed the purposeful tension between the player’s desires and what they can do in the game, and how they designed towards that. This talk like unlocked something in my brain about our own game, which was really just that we have pretty much the same goal in our own design!
- A ton of talks by the leads on the Ghost of Yotei team where they talked about a ton of stuff, but mostly how they designed their open world. How they guided players, both with onboarding and their “event deck,” how they troubleshooted, how they ensured players engaged with the open world and didn’t get lost, etc. These talks were super useful as they got me thinking about our tiny little open world as an actual open world!
- A talk ostensibly about the level design of Baby Steps by Gabe Cuzzillo, which turned out to be more about guiding players towards self-motivation, and detoxing them from built-in gamey rewards systems.
- I went to a bunch of other talks too, but these were the most inspirational towards this project! I think they really helped us find direction after the feedback that we got earlier this month! We’ve since discussed a basic path forward for what we want our next build to look like!
Next Steps
- Treat our small open world like an actual open world
- Limit the player and give them guidance
- Rocks are collected towards an emotional purpose (divorced from narrative mechanics and mystery)
- The player can only hold up to two rocks at a time, in a new UI, and when holding a rock, the player can’t use their device.
- We’ve already implemented this, and the results were surprising (in a good way). The new UI really works towards the player embodying the kid they’re playing as. It’s way more direct than the somewhat abstract physics UI because the rocks are literally right there in your hands.
- In the morning, the player will run to school among a river of other schoolchildren, with branches off of that main path (players house to school) blocked off by adults. This will get the player acquainted with the main road through town.
- On the first day, the players best friend will tell them where they are going after school. This, along with road signs, will help the player get oriented without robbing them of the feeling of exploration.
- Give the player more to do
- This is helped along by the narrative framing of rock collection! Players can now drop off rocks that they want to store towards that “5 best rocks” at their house and at the school.
- Now that picking up and putting down rocks has been simplified, the mechanics of it can be applied to a number of objects, like flowers, fish, bugs, old discarded bus tickets, etc.
- Smooth out the cognitive distance and UX/UI path to dropping and throwing rocks.
- Now that we have a simple two-hand UI for holding things, dropping and throwing can be simplified and made way more fun! The left and right hand are tied directly to left and right click. If you left click, you pick up with your left hand, and right click your right hand. If you’re holding something already, clicking again will drop it, and if you click and hold, you charge up a throw in the direction you’re facing!
- Show the passage of time
- For now, we’ve just added falling leaf particles under trees, but we’ll think of more ways to show that time passes!
- An idea for how adults talk: Adults talk in fragments that drift out of their faces like particles. If they’re whispering about something they wouldn’t want a child to hear, the particles shrink the closer the player gets.
- These things open up avenues that we’d like to explore in the remainder of Thesis. Maybe there’s an adult who you hear complaining about their empty flower bed, so you go off to pick them some flowers. Maybe you can gift the other kids all sorts of items that you’ve picked up! Maybe there are little stacks of rocks that you can knock over by throwing your rock at them! Maybe there’s a locked door, and you can find and pick up the key!
- The main remaining question here is how do we reward these things? This part is really important so I’ll give it it’s own section called “Tension and intrinsic value”
Tension and Intrinsic Value
The core of our game is the tension between what the player wants to do (solve a mystery), and what the player character wants to do/ what the player can do (play, enjoy childhood, etc). That tension should be palpable, and should cause the player to reflect on what drives them and why. In an ideal experience, the player would eventually come around to appreciating the intrinsic value of what they can do in the game. They would climb the mountain just for the sake of climbing it, or for kicking over the stack of cans at the top.
That means that anything that the player can do “for fun” should have no rewards tied to the narrative, like clues to the mystery. I think that it also means that anything that the player can do for fun should have no rewards period. As in, if you plant flowers in this adult’s flowerbed, they wouldn’t give you a fancy new rock that might help you towards your character’s end goal. If that were to have intrinsic value, there would be nothing given in return. The value is in the act itself. I think. The idea of the “five best rocks” is so abstract and unquantifiable (aside from the number, I guess), that I wonder if a fancy new rock, like… counts?
It’s sort of a precipice, where rewarding players with cool new rocks sends us tumbling down a delightful ravine into a totally different game than if we refrain. Probably a more fun game, but I think that instinct is worth fighting against in this case specifically. Maybe we can just give the player really shitty rocks as a reward lol.
In reality, my best guess is this:
Collecting rocks as the act that has intrinsic value would mean that maybe we should remove the narrative motivation for collecting rocks entirely? and then we can use rocks as a reward.
Existing in the world as the act that has intrinsic value, as in walking through the map, picking and planting beautiful flowers, etc, would mean that those acts should have no reward whatsoever.
I’m not entirely sure if this is true. This is a huge problem.