Setting the direction

This time the game is going to be about “message” and after making several prototypes, I chose autobiography. I love all things in life and I find everything in life interesting. Recently, I was troubled by the COVID in China and my girlfriend and I started a long distance relationship from different countries without the opportunity to meet. I often think about what will be the next time we see each other. We were 9,000 km apart, so I started to imagine what our future meeting would be like. I decided to make it my game. I put all my thoughts about her in the game.

Cases Study

“Tick Tock”, a puzzle game, focuses on two-player split-screen cooperation, in which participants open two clients, transmit what they see and hear to their partner, and solve the puzzle together with the clues they receive. The story is divided into 3 chapters, involving a total of about 15-20 puzzles, the difficulty of the puzzles is moderately low, compared to some other secret room levels are much easier, but the deviation of information generated in the process of communication between the two participants increases the difficulty of the game, but also is the fun of the game.”One Way” is a puzzle game where the objective is to find a blue ball on each floor to get the energy for the elevator to go up. The plot is well designed, the puzzles are not too difficult but interesting, and the game’s guidance is very well done. Since my game is not too difficult in the design of the puzzles, I mainly study the design of the game in the puzzles and the guidance of solving the puzzles through this game.

Reflections and Conclusions

TickTock

• This work in the packaging of the puzzle is trying to simplify, in the same scene to do content changes, so that players can be reused to solve the thinking (thinking single does not mean that the puzzle mode becomes less)
• In a clearer linear narrative plot, the clues are independent of each other, which greatly reduces the difficulty of solving the puzzle. There are 4 scenes in each chapter, representing the departure point, the studio, the living room, and the special building in that order
  • Leaving point is the chapter pass puzzle, you need to get clues in other scenes
  • The studio usually has core clues (Noor, 2016), but special conditions must be met to enter
  • Living room puzzles can usually be solved without clues from other scenes
  • Special buildings usually have core clues, but require clues from other scenes to solve

• Disadvantages of two-player puzzle games
  • High demands on the player experience; players cannot start playing quickly and need a companion
  • The biggest snag in the actual experience of this mechanism is the lack of serious participation of companions, which turns the whole game into a single-player mode, and then players will ignore the elaborate interactive plot designed by the makers and only care about whether the puzzles are interesting and reasonably difficult

• Advantages of two-player puzzle games.
  • First, it greatly enhances the player’s immersion. When I told my companion that I found the clue in the gloomy basement, I would emphasize the dark and dirty basement, the rats scurrying around the sewage scene to highlight my “hard” to find the clue to make him pay attention to the clue, and to ensure the integrity of the clue, will also repeatedly describe the picture seen, in the minds of both parties involved to strengthen the impression of the scene. Single-player decryption often neglects to encounter scary, interesting, moving, surprising scenes, or emotional fluctuations are only transient and cannot be remembered for a long time.
  • Second, two-player decryption increases the cost of abandoning the game. In single-player puzzle games, most people will give up the game due to the reason of stuck level and limited time. The two-player puzzle will alleviate the situation of getting stuck due to the lack of ideas, and the companion’s desire to solve the puzzle will prompt players who want to give up to have an emotional drive to finish the game.

One Way

The One Way scenes go up all the time, and are one-way, in levels. Therefore, when we solve the puzzle of a scene, we can safely move forward. We can’t control this elevator to go backward, only one-way forward. Thus, in this game, there is no spanning of props and scenes like in other puzzle games.
The puzzles are relatively simple and the interactions are very simple but very smooth between puzzles and the clue guidance is excellent. The main ways to solve the puzzles are

• Observe the colors
• Observing numbers
• Looking for clues to trigger animations
• Puzzles
• Looking for sequences
• Looking for patterns
  All were simple puzzles in terms of interaction design, and matched my programming skills.

Through case studies, I decided to make a series of two-player puzzles based on the simplest “click” trigger puzzles. It was a perfect match for the theme of my game: me and my girlfriend’s autobiography.

Player’s Feedback

First feedback.

• The level puzzles are too simple and too flowing. Once you find one thing, you can open all the things behind it in a series, losing the fun of solving puzzles.
• Some puzzles don’t trigger “success” even if you choose the right one.
• Some hints are not obvious.
• There is no cooperation between the two players, it’s more of a single player game.

Second feedback.

• The pacing of the puzzles was off. There is an imbalance between the two players’ perceptions of the rhythm of the puzzles: for example, Player A can first solve what he can unlock alone in the level, and then work together to unlock it. Player B, on the other hand, needs to wait for Player A’s cooperation as soon as he enters the level, resulting in a problem with the rhythm of the two players, which may cause a bad experience, e.g. one player is happily solving the puzzle while the other player is waiting anxiously.

Third feedback.

• The game was designed from the designer’s point of view, not the player’s point of view. Some puzzles that I took for granted could be completed, but in the player’s eyes were actually difficult.

Fourth feedback.
When I finished the first set of levels, I invited Maddy & David and 2 other pairs of players to experience the game. The conclusion was that the clues in the levels were not at all obvious.

• The clues about the puzzle were not obvious, and the player did not know what I needed to find or do if I wanted to solve the puzzle.
• The clues about two-player cooperation are not obvious, the player does not know what is required to tell the other player to tell themselves, and what is allowed to tell others.
• The screen is too dark, making it difficult to see the clues.
• It’s hard for players to tell which things are clickable and which things are not clickable.
• The UI is not visible when opened in certain browsers.

Fifth feedback.

• Clue hints are clearer, but may be too straightforward, causing players to lose the fun of solving the puzzle.
• Some parts of the puzzle lacked playability and were more like going through the motions.
• The rhythm of two people working together has gotten better, but it still happens that players don’t know whether they have the clue in their hands or in the other player’s hands.
• There are still some bugs, even some that affect the critical process.

Six feedback.

• Backpack things are not sensitive to click, will appear to be unable to click the phenomenon, need to move the mouse down some to be able to click.
• Some puzzles still lack guidance, resulting in multiple solutions but only one can trigger success, which does not make sense.

Outcomes

/ Personal aims and objectives /
My personal goals are to make a fun and warm game. The initial goal was to make 8 levels (four levels per player); but limited by the fact that I needed to do everything alone and didn’t have enough time, I preferred to make sophisticated games, so my final goal was to make four levels and + one ending level. And can narrate the eagerness and anticipation of my girlfriend and I to see each other.

/ Playthrough of Final Prototype /
After the final prototype was made, I made repeated attempts. I almost achieved what I expected, but there are still many details that are not perfect. For example, there are still some minor problems in the program – but they don’t affect the game experience. I have done my best to fix these problems, but still not completely fixed.
Based on several feedback from players, I made a lot of optimizations. The last one was that players didn’t understand how to operate the game’s backpack, so I added a guide at the beginning of the game. Now the whole game is very complete.
This game requires two players to open two games to play simultaneously. Each player will face a different scene, different items in the scene and different puzzles. But there are always clues that will make you realize that there are many clues that are closely related to the scenes of both of them. There are many puzzles that require two people to work together to really solve and get out of the room.
What players have to do in each level is to find a date through a series of puzzles, and once found, they can move on to the next scene. This date is actually the day you can jump to. It represents the time that my girlfriend and I want to be able to jump to a specific future so that we can see each other faster. The puzzles in these scenes represent the difficulties my girlfriend and I encountered in order to see each other.
I’m in a spooky cabin: representing that I’m not at home, I’m out on an adventure, and I’m dying to see her, so I go from the cabin to the forest and get ready to go back to the city. And my girlfriend’s first scene was in the office, representing her living the life she should be living in the city, but still missing me, so she went into the city after work (the second scene), ready to leave the city and head the way to find me. Eventually she made her way through a magical store and into the forest as well – she had found me before I even went looking for her.
When the last date was found, we finally saw each other. We barbecued in front of the campfire, expressing our thoughts about each other ….

/ Summary of development /
After deciding on a topic, I decided on the framework of the game I wanted to design. Then, I went to do a case study to study case studies of related games in order to learn from them. After I designed some of the levels, I started to draw art resources.
I made the art resources in levels, so I went back to make the gameplay after I made a level and gave the level to the players. So in the whole process, I optimized the game many times through the player’s game experience. And reached the final more desirable effect.
In the end, after making all the levels, I took it back to the players to experience and optimize the areas that the players felt needed to be improved.
The final version of the game more problems in the program, I hope that after the ability to optimize the program problems.

/Critical reflection/

1. In the game design, no matter what kind of gameplay is designed, the plot design needs to be filled in well in order to look more exquisite. We should pay attention to the balance of gameplay and plot.
2. When I drew the art resources, I found that my imagination was not as rich as when I drew when I designed the gameplay, which led to changing the planning scheme all the time.
3. my programming speed is too slow, resulting in the design of things to achieve very slow, the project progress is dragged
4. Even a simple puzzle game that can be solved by clicking requires a very smooth game flow design. It needs a clever loop to solve.
5. Puzzle difficulty = new puzzle ideas. For the gameplay ideas that have been exported to the player, although the length of the puzzle can be extended by increasing the number of elements and types of elements in the level, the process no longer has any practical challenge for the player

References:

Noor,N.(2016) ‘Inventive problem-solving puzzle game design and development’,International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics,(6),p.3. Wang,Y.(202) Understanding puzzle game design: How do fun puzzles get made?Available at:http://www.yitb.com/article-2627 (Accessed:5 May 2022)