Week 9 Group work Discussions And Chat

—Write By Cindy and Nam

We’re back from the Easter break. Reviewing the feedback from Week 8, we found that players showed roughly equal interest in both graphic and text-based puzzles, and many suggested combining the strengths of both – the fun of graphics with the difficulty of text. We discussed many different solutions and ultimately decided to retain the text-based puzzle mechanic as the primary mechanism, but not be limited to it. Designing detailed mechanics for each puzzle from the protagonist’s perspective was our main focus this week.

Maria proposed a new idea during the discussion: hidden bonus items. Clicking on the character at specific times would trigger special dialogues, and completing these dialogues would grant corresponding score bonuses. We strongly agree with this idea, concluding that it effectively reflects real-world interactions. Unlocking hidden dialogues demonstrates good rapport, allowing for deeper conversations and providing players with a pleasant surprise (score bonuses and ensuring a satisfying experience for players who enjoy collecting side quests).

Nam mentioned that a missing element in his game development was the UI design. Cindy took on this task and pointed out a previously overlooked aspect: feedback from previous game testing regarding player feedback during gameplay. This was crucial because players needed to assess the correctness of their answers based on the scores they received after completing questions, and to learn how to improve for future attempts. Therefore, displaying a speech bubble next to the character after answering a question, with the score displayed within the bubble, was an effective way to represent this.

Cindy designed the UI according to the requirements, including dialog boxes and speech bubbles, and sent them as PSD files with transparent backgrounds according to Nam’s request, so that Nam could edit them in Unity：

Mechanic changes and more puzzles:

From last week’s playtesting, we decided that having players arrange the words to create a sentence is non-optimal, as it creates confusion for players and is also very hard to manage. Conversation is an abstract thing, so there could be a lot of sensible answers that we did not account for, and if the players made those answers and the system told them that they were wrong, it would be unclear to the players what they were supposed to do.

So we change the mechanic: instead of having to arrange in a specific order, some important words will hold the points, and the players will get points by choosing those words, and the more words they choose, the higher points they get

To prevent the players from accidentally choosing the correct word while meaning the opposite, we decided to put the points in key words like “Yes”, “like”, “want”, “forget”, and disable the opposite meaning words “No”, “hate”, “remember.”

Word arranging:

Only choosing important words:

After that, we add all the mechanics that we discussed before:

The leaf swiping mechanics, where the player has to swipe the “distractions,” to be able to see the words and have a conversation.

And the mechanics where the NPC appears on the side of the screen and the players have to touch the bear, which serves as a fidget toy to focus on the conversation:

Finally, we added the backgrounds from Maria, along with some UI elements from Cindy to finish the prototype and be ready for the playtest.