Paula Vales

To Please a Noble: Developing into a concept

Games similar to this concept: Yes, Your Grace, PotionCraft

Activity: You are given a booklet of regions and beauty standards across the land. Your job is to make maidens attractive using medieval tools to appeal to nobles.

Rewards: Your reputation is increased if the maiden gets notices by her noble of choice- you will receive a letter by the end of the work day/week.

Opportunity: More of a satirical take on beauty standards and how it’s always been there for women. Can offer an educational standpoint. You also unlock more gruesome tools as you go along in the game.

For this game’s game loop, I didn’t have much to compare it to, which can be seen as a good thing.

Prototyping Process:

I didn’t take pictures of my process unfortunately, but I’ll go through stages of my thought process when making this.

Purpose of this prototype: Show mechanics, narrative, and how the art would look like.

First thing I needed to think about was, what are the materials I need to make this paper prototype? Obviously I needed some paper, pens/pencils, and scissors. Then I thought about what were the things I needed to make in order for this prototype to be successful:

• Maiden drawing from the thigh up
• Booklet of beauty standards
• Map showing the different regions
• Tools -> wasp sting venom, soot paste, spider legs, rose thorns
• Facial features -> plumper lips, thicker eyebrows, thicker eyebrows + eyes with longer lashes.
• x3 Narrative speech bubbles -> 1 Maiden speech, 1 Narration, 1 Player speech

For the map asset, I went on a website that would generate different maps: https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/

For the booklet paper asset, I simply made a small booklet and faked some writing. But I did some light research on beauty standards across the globe during the medieval era and standards now

Blue region:

• Pale, perfect skin
• Full bodied
• Thin lips
• Straight, long hair
• Thin eyebrows

Green region:

• Rosy cheeks
• Narrow nose bridge
• Wavy hair
• Freckled skin
• High cheekbones
• Thin body

Yellow region:

• Tanned skin
• Long lashes
• Curvier body
• Thick eyebrows
• Long hair

Next step of this process was thinking about how the prototype would showcase the mechanics:

Maiden comes up to you (player’s name is Madame Agnes) and asks you to change her make her beautiful. In her speech, she lets the player know that the noble is from a specific region. Using the booklet, you flick through the pages and find out which region the city/town resides in. Once you do, you look at the beauty standards stated. You will be given a myriad of tools to beautify your customers, but in this prototype, there are only 4. This is just to showcase the basics of the mechanics. The player is then able to click, drag and drop the tools to the maiden and she will receive new features.

Prototype Video:

Concept Art:

For the concept art, I wanted to show a variety of facial features and body shapes. I tried to do this fairly quick as I only wanted to present the types of maidens you can expect to come across; each maiden looks different.

In my video, we can see that I discarded the first drawing, I didn’t think it fit the concept well- it looked stiff and it’s not what I had in mind for the art style.

Thoughts and takeaways

I really liked how the prototype came out in the end, it showcased all the main mechanics of the game. I also liked my concepts of the maidens, I did it relatively fast .