final
Abstract
** Game starts on Layout 2 ** My game is meant to play off the idea that the player is some celebrity/notable person trying to get ready for an event while dodging photographers. Aesthetically, I used a lot of light blues in the initial screens. I wanted the main layout to look like a third person, somewhat bird’s eye view of a salon or special dressing venue. I wanted there to be individual rooms and floors that could indicate to players that something of value would be in each room. I wanted gameplay to be relatively challenging with lasting tension. I would say the main theme of gameplay would be user learning. I haven’t played many games, but I went for a smoother look for the sprite’s as opposed to the more pixelated objects that seem to be really common among construct 3 games. The game engages class concepts by maintaining a certain level of suspense for the player and includes a brief instruction set. I designed the game in a way such that it would take the player a few tries to figure out how to successfully retrieve objects without colliding with a photographer. This promotes user learning as well as suspense as they get farther and farther, then set back if they fail to pick up on patterns quick enough. While my game doesn’t include multiple levels, the difficulty is meant to increase as the player advances, as they have to keep track of more and more enemy movement patterns. A lot of the time, enemies were off screen, so the player needs to mentally time their movements and keep track of which ones are fast vs. slow. The player needs to do this all while finding safe zones--i.e. Places where enemies won’t reach in order to observe their surroundings and calculate their next move. As for instructions, I was inspired by Florence’s minimal instruction set. While my game doesn’t involve nearly as much story line and is more play-based, I tried to incorporate some direction, while letting the player figure out for the most part what they’re supposed to do. I felt that for Florence it added not only an interesting stylistic element, but also allows for a heightened player learning experience. Given the design of the game, the player doesn't really have much autonomy over what they do because the game has a specific strategy. However, I feel like the beginning instruction layouts make them feel as though they somehow had some time for exploration/ understanding the character. I tried to be somewhat innovative by basing gameplay on multiple actions: finding objects, identifying their order, and avoiding enemies. I find that most 2D games, like candy crush, are based on one action or motive like connecting similar looking candies. However, I’ve only played 2 online games outside of class in my life-- the Sims 3 and some other game similar to it-- so I don’t know if I just lack exposure to other games. (Florence was the first game I ever downloaded from the app store.) I’d like to think the game is also innovative in that it’s very simple, yet requires a lot of tries to determine patterns/ what to do. During play testing I was mainly told that the game was too hard and it was making people angry. Without realizing it, the first playable version of my game was pretty much impossible to win. The enemies moved too fast, while the player was too slow. Thus, it was really difficult for players to outrun enemies or really explore the map without running into trouble. This is obviously bad because, while I intended to game to elicit some anxiety, it mainly caused annoyance. This made other aspects of the game frustrating, because moving around the map was basically impossible. The game is largely based off the player navigating the map. Thus, whenever a player would find an object, they’d often discover it wasn’t the correct one, so they’d have to find their way to a new one, which was apparently super frustrating, given it was hard to move anywhere. I addressed this by slowing down some of the enemies and speeding up the player. I found that a good solution was to create variety in the speeds of the enemies, as it added to the learning curve while also increasing the difficulty as the game progressed. I was also told that at first the character’s movements were weird (they would go upside down), so I fixed that.