Log #14: Oct/20/2024

• Refining our Demo
• Someone does my job for me!?
• Whiteboards and Monitors
• When Thinking is Hard

With the looming threat that our game was going to be reviewed again, our team worked to polish our project into something a little bit neater looking. During this time, we made note of more problems others had while playtesting, and found ways to make the gameplay more intuitive. Now the NPC that gives you coffee actually (sort of) looks like he's at a cafe counter!

After the work everyone put in, and thanks to helpful feedback from outside and inside our team, we were able to create a DEMO that is waaay nicer to play. Some criticism was slightly hard for me to take, but it turned out to be very helpful. Even things that I didn't think would be a huge deal, like where exactly this piece of paper was placed in the game, turned out to greatly improve the player experience (as it turns out, when people can see the piece of paper, they know where it is).

I also found myself embarrassed because of how little I had prepared our overall game's ending. Honestly, I've been struggling to design our game lately because there is a number of things that I am still unsure about, and coming up with the ideas is almost stressful for some reason. However, when I take a minute to breath, and quiet my head, ideas do come to me. I just have to remain calm even when I don't know what to do, and then let ideas come. Then I can pick the best ideas that show themselves to me.

Thankfully, one of our team's coders stepped up on the desing front. They were reading the documentation I had written for the game, and began asking questions. This revealed many of my uncertainties, and together we discussed what to do for the game. Honestly, my programmers are too good. This helped greatly improve our desing documentation (which they began writing at this point), and it was really awesome to hear someone else offer up cool-sounding ideas. It's helpful for me to learn that I can discuss ideas about the game with the rest of the team, and that with just a little quiet time listening, cool ideas will come.

I was able to draft some actual character ideas for our game's NPCs, and I plotted out more of the gameplay, such as the 'whiteboards task,' and the 'mind monitor' task.

MATH SEGMENT: Data

As I said above, we got plenty of helpful feedback from people who played our game. It was intersting to hear how something as simple as a progress bar really motivated our players. Seeing what appeals to our players and what things are confusing is a great help.

One thing that pretty much everyone who playtested the early versions of our game struggled with was the user interface on the in-game paperwork. After seeing how everyone struggled with this part of the game, we continually knew it needed to be improved. Say "thank you" to our team's coders who spent FOREVER working on the in-game paperwork.

Another immediate and positive peace of data we recieved was how players responded to our game's in-progress whiteboard system. Allowing players to simply erase text on whiteboards whereever they clicked turned out to be a highly engaging process. Everyone who touched the whiteboards seemed to have fun with it. This is a good sign that we should utilize these whiteboards.

Additionally, most of our players had a hard time finding an item in our game. Seeing repeated struggles with this part of the game is interesting, because it was not intended to be a struggle. By simply having a thin hallway out of the player's sight, a lot of people take a while to find it. Since we don't want this part of the game to be hidden, that means we should consider redesigning the layout of our game's world, even if just by making that elusive hallway a little easier to see.

Getting data from our players is not only fun, but it's also extremely informative. Without playtesting, I firmly believe are game would be a lot crappier.

MATH SEGMENT: Functions added Nov/1/2024

I mentioned above how one of the team's programmers helped plan out the game's ending. After they wrote up the new ideas, I went through what was written and organized the information. This part of our process is pretty important, because it basically states what our game will be (assuming we follow it).

For example, we needed to know how the ending of our game would happen. We ultimately decided that it would be triggered after completing a certain number of jobs, no matter how well the jobs were completed.

But because we wanted to have the player's actions influence the game's endings, we decided we would store the quality of the player's actions as they completed the game's final tasks. The game's outcome could then be expressed in a way that is dependant on what our players did.

From a more technical level, we decided to make some of our game's ending have "point requiements". If the player hadn't gotten enough points from doing quality work in-game, then they wont have the option for the better endings of our game. This allows us to set up simple logic to determine the ending the player will receive, while also allowing the player receieve the "natural consequences" of their actions.

Organizing the plot of our game based on what information determines the branches in the game's story helps us make our ideas more concrete, and also allows us to better look at the story's design by considering what player actions get measured.

That's all for today, and as always, thank you for taking the time to read this.

-Luke Knotts