Progress:
In the past week, tangible progress has been a little slow, as we spent most of our time in meetings about this or that, about feedback and what to do next, about our story, or meeting with others to have them play the current iteration of the game. As far as the actual build of the game, it is in the same place that it was last week. But in our meetings and playtests, we made many important strides!
Most notably, we have settled on the objective truth of the narrative, the exact details of what happened
and what fuels various rumors that the player will never see. So that’s fantastic!
Dialogue System:
On Thursday, we playtested with and received feedback from two people who both had us thinking
about the nature of our dialogue system and the balance that we are trying to maintain between that and, as our advisor called it “fooling around.” In other words, we don’t want our playing to feel like a detective, or to feel like they’re trying to get a system to respond by entering the right combination of stickers. Instead, we want them to feel like they’re a kid, playing around and having fun in this town while something bigger than them and a little scary happens around them, and other kids talk about it. After these playtests, we decided to try out one dialogue system where the NPCs can also only speak in stickers.
Of course we’re already planning to test out different iterations of our current dialogue system, but I had a thought for one that really drastically changes not just the function of the system, but how it is presented to the player as well. If we don’t want the player to be hyperfocused on investigation, maybe we need to minimize the interface through which investigation happens. So my thought was: Rather than the player imitating a chat and opening up an entire dedicated screen, what if messages sent by NPCs simply appear in a small dialogue bubble above their head when the player is close enough? And then to send out a message of their own, the player brings up their sticker keyboard and only their sticker keyboard. To leave a chat, all the player has to do is walk away. This may also function better as more of a “broadcast” system, where a message can be read by anyone who is close enough, but that’s not super clear yet. I wonder if by minimizing this system, it may help the balance swing more towards “fooling around” and passively chatting with friends.
Also, for our winter showcase build we plan to have the same scene outside of the school, but with each of the kids using a different dialogue system/parser, since we want to experiment with a ton of different systems!
Other Design Thoughts:
As we think more and more about our game, we get further into the “nitty gritty’(? i wish i could think of a better phrase) details of how our systems would work and interlock. A growing topic of concern lately has been time. Will the player move time forward on their own by entering or exiting a space, interacting with a key object? Will time move forward based on messages sent or people spoken to? Will time move forward on a timer? These are such important questions to us because we have a key factor that we want to avoid: The player feeling as though they are missing out on information (conversation that they couldn’t have). That’s of course deeply tied to the other aspect of the player not feeling like they’re parsing a system to uncover information, but I think the passage of time will have some impact on that overall. We found some possible references in Moon, a ps1 RPG parody, and Despelote, an indie game from our very own program!
If it’s not clear by now, a big part of what we’re trying to do is to trick the player into feeling like their beliefs developed organically (obscuring the relationship system, minimizing the depth and importance of the dialogue system in favor of fooling around), and that their beliefs are correct (through many of the same means), so that an ending that disproves these facts is more impactful.
In a playtest with one of our seniors, Hatim, he mentioned playing animal crossing on the DS when he was a kid, and how there is a friendship system in that game where when you’re close enough with a villager, they would send you a letter with a picture of themselves attached. He told us about this emote that villagers would do, where sparkles appeared above their head, but they were randomized particles, and childhood Hatim had believed that when there were three sparkles instead of two, he was closer to befriending that villager. He encouraged us to put this kind of feedback in the game, and I think he may have meant to implement it in the way that young Hatim thought it worked in animal crossing, but I found the whole story really interesting for the opposite reason. It reminds me of something that our advisor Winnie said about procedural dialogue systems, encouraging us to be vague in our dialogue, and let the player’s imagination do the work of building connections, because it will. I love the idea of a world full of feedback for nothing in particular, that lets a player’s imagination run wild with possible connections. Not to so much of an extreme, but to the level of childhood Hatim playing animal crossing, certainly.
Narrative:
Our advisor Winnie put forth an idea for a place to be for showcase narratively, which was just to have the player leave the experience being like “That was cute and fun! But I think there’s something going on here…” I think that’s a great place for us to be, and brings up a concern I had about the dialogue that I’ve written so far, which is that it’s quite on the nose. If the player were to see all of, say, Blackberry’s dialogue, they would be like “Blackberry thinks that Blueberry is an evil killer,” which is NOT where we want the player to be. BUT, the player of course won’t get all of their dialogue. So as we experiment with these different parsers and dialogue systems, I think it’s very important for us to also consider this, how much of a certain belief is actually being fed to a player at a time in each system.
In that same conversation, we mentioned our intentions to have more onboarding for winter showcase in the form of a “day 0” where the player is tutorialized and given an explanation for why they can only talk in stickers through some cutscenes and directed actions. Winnie suggested we not bother with onboarding right now, because eventually we’ll have to do that, like if this is ever published, or made into a fully finished state, then we’ll have to cater to players. So for now, she said we should just be selfish and create only for ourselves, without worrying about stuff like tutorialization. I think I agree!
Jib and I discussed a particular ending to the narrative, where in the end the typhoon completely decimates the town, and most people die except for the older kid, who wanders the now empty seaside in the post-storm sun. I offered it up because it felt sad and powerful, and I could imagine like dramatic fanart of the moments before it happens, and after discussing it feels quite compelling, as it may do the strong work of shocking the player into reflection by taking all of this theorizing, all of these rumors, this quite dramatic story of death in a small town, and destroying it, saying “this doesn’t matter at all, and never did, because all of this is terribly fragile, and all we are is alive.” We felt it might be stronger than more of a “non-ending,” where we choose to have nothing dramatic at all happen, because that would allow a player to say “well, maybe the dramatic thing happens later, off screen,” rather than to accept that all of this culminates in absolutely no drama at all.
In a conversation and playtest with our step-advisor Karina, she brought up an awesome and brilliant idea. When you’re a kid, you often hear about very serious and dramatic things purely through word of mouth, and other kids telling rumors and stuff. So what if the player never actually sees the body? In our current build of the game, we have the player walking right by the body with a bunch of police and adults standing around it. But what if the player didn’t ever see the body, or the police, or the people? What if they never saw the active sene at all? I thought this was so brilliant, and would totally help with the balance of the player feeling a need to investigate deeply this mystery. It’s quite main character-y, for the player to walk right by the body, and one of our big points is that the player character ISN’T a main character at all. The allure of a mystery to solve and a system to understand is SO much more compelling to a player than just fooling around, and I think this would be a big step to balancing that.
We discussed a number of key events that the player could experience this week, and while we probably don’t have a full list yet, it’s getting there. We’re maybe at like half? And with the truth of the narrative much more concrete, hopefully we can fill out the rest of that list in the coming week. Next step for the current chunk of events would be to map out/sketch/storyboard some key moments in those events!
Other notes:
Jib and I went to Kinokuniya today and grabbed an art book that seems like great reference for like, infrastructure and how roads, buildings, and nature interact and frame each other. Flipped through it when we got home and marked off a bunch of pages! That type of stuff is difficult for me to visualize, because for some reason my ideas of town layouts are so grid-coded. Maybe because I just think of video game towns? Not that it matters. The book seems great! I’m glad we grabbed it!
It’s also getting quite cold, which isn’t related to the game, but is of note. We only have one small throw blanket, so we have to buy a new one that’s super warm and a bit bigger, otherwise what will we do when it’s freezing outside and we want to be cozy and read or play a game? These things are important to think about, especially when your mind is so occupied with a big deal project like this one. If you can’t think about being cozy, what’s the point of it all anyways?
Next Steps:
Our next steps remain relatively the same.
Some further considerations and research:
Feedback and Animations like in Hatim’s Animal Crossing story.
A new dialogue system iteration with simple text bubbles in a spatial UI.
No more day 0 onboarding (for now).
No more seeing the body/the scene?
Moon RPG
Despelote
until next time! stay warm!