On Monday, we had a lecture about game puzzles and mechanics and how to implement them into the game world.

Key takeaways:

• Puzzles provide a unique challenge
• They add depth and variety to a game
• Create a sense of achievement
• Integrate with the narrative (e.g., progress a story?)
• Teach players new concepts to move further
• The goal is to find a solution

What makes puzzles great?

• Novelty – puzzles that get something familiar and give it a twist
• Challenge – too easy it is disappointing, too difficult it is discouraging/playtest

Anything can be a puzzle

• Spatial: manipulate objects in the play space
• Environmental: influence the world
• Physics-Based: understand the physical principles
• Logical: decipher the pattern/deduction

Games can’t be played wrong but they can be made wrong!

We also started preparing for the playtest on Thursday, and we needed to create a document with objectives and things we wanted to achieve during the playtest.

I was assigned to take all the notes and feedback during the testing, while Jess was in charge of introducing the game to the players. She wrote down her introduction and I have put down all our tasks and objectives. The feedback was later written down in the same document to keep these things together for everyone’s access.

We had different people from different years participating and that also helped us to understand different perspectives and different opinions. Mostly, people enjoyed the idea and the concept of the game, but some found it difficult to navigate without clear tutorials and UI. It was expected, because we didn’t really include much UI in the game, and we knew it was something we needed to work on. The character designs received positive feedback as well.

As a Narrative Designer, there are a few things that I personally took from the playtest:

• Using character dialogue as a source of navigation and clues really helps.
• Dialogue windows need to have the characters’ faces in them to make it clearer who is talking.
• Need to think about how to make it clearer for the player that the child at the start and Mabel are two different people.
• Making the backstory into a short-formatted slideshow helps with the pacing of the game.

After the playtest, we have agreed to have a meeting as a group with the teacher on Monday, because over the past weeks we have been experiencing delay in work and other issues that needed to be brought up. We understood that the tasks had to be re-distributed between everyone to make sure the workflow is equal for everyone and no one feels like they have too much to do. I personally felt like some teammates weren’t putting as much effort in the project.