In the guest lecture this week, Sarah Cole spoke about puzzling narratives. The most significant insight that came out of the talk was that UX design is how one constructs a narrative. Another crucial insight from the lecture was that one cannot properly test one’s narrative as one knows too much about it. Our current work with Backchat has certainly benefited from these insights, considering the fact that the whole game centers around the user interface to convey the narrative about ASD and its social challenges.
This week also saw a game design review and a subsequent retrospective within the team. In this retro, we reviewed what things went well and what obstacles we faced during our last sprints. Our goal was to find areas for improvement in our process instead of blaming each other. While discussing the confusing gameplay from last week’s playtest, we engaged in an entirely open conversation about overhauling our mechanics. It was clear the old interactions were too complicated for our programmer to implement smoothly. Hence, as the Mechanics Designer, I pitched several new concepts from my design document that might be simpler to code while conveying the right emotion. One of my suggestions involved blurring the screen whenever the player undergoes sensory overload, forcing the user to keep clicking the screen to remain focused. My other idea entailed a dialogue system that limits responses to fragmented words extracted from the NPC’s dialogue, simulating real social pressure. We spent the rest of this week heavily researching and debating which of these new mechanisms to adopt.