02.03.2026 – Guest Lecture
Guest speaker Sarah Cole gave us a guest lecture on puzzle narratives. She has a background as a video game designer, but her deeper interests lie in board games/TTRPGs. Her talk revolved around the differences between digital and analogue games and how they can enable/constraint narrative design.
Video games, she made clear, are infintely flexible in comparison to board games, which are very inflexible, need players to self-regulate the stories of them, and struggle to accomodate for a range of differing player capabilities. Equally though, video games are relative to the technology they are built around, and have much lesser control over player reactions, so they are still rather constrained in terms of narrative design.
TTRPGs on the other hand, she argued, are inherently flexible in comparison to both board games and video games – skilled game masters are able to alter narratives on the fly to keep players engaged in the story at hand. However, this leads to a curious knock-on-effect Cole calls “death of the author”, by which she means that due to the impact of GM on the game, the author’s intent on the narrative can become quite easily skewed, which can runin the impact of the storytelling at times. At the same time however, it can also lead to very personal and engaging narratives taking place; depending on the type of experience you wish to create, it can have very strong positive or negative consequences.
05.03.2026 – Game Design Review
As a team during our Thursday session, we did a collective review activity in which we analysed what had gone well in our project so far and what had not gone as well, as well as how to improve these faults.
General consensus among our team was that the majority of us have been very consistent in our communication and the work we are producing, and that this led to us having a very successful playtest as we had everything on time and were able to accumulate a wide range of feedback.
As for what did not go well, admittedly there was not a great amount to improve upon: though we did admit that some of our established systems – namely our to-do list, team miroboard and team WordPress page – were underutilised at the time. Furthermore, we felt that some of our team guidelines had been breached by one member, which led to us agreeing to communicate them more strongly over the coming weeks.
We also wished to have more updates from individual teammates, particularly using Slack, as more regular face-to-face meetings weekly. We decided we would all make a stronger collective effort to show up for Tuesday group meetings in particular.
Week 6 Developments
Over week 6, I worked with the primary focus of implementing the peacock minigame into Misty’s project as a UI overlay, rather than as an individual scene in the program – this was as a result of the feedback we recived from our first playtest in Week 5. You can see my development pages for this below:
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