Center for Computational Experience

The overall designed goal for this game is to make it a relaxing cute game. The design of the game lets players control the bunny to jump through different levels of conveyor belts in order to “eat” the desserts. There are five types of dessert, in total, coming out of machines. There are three specific types of desserts that the player needs to collect for a certain amount. The other two types, however, need to be avoided. The player wins the game when they reach the amount of all three kinds of desserts and still has life left. (Players have three lives at the beginning of the game, lives will be deducted each time the player eats a dessert that is supposed to be avoided) The aesthetic components that shape the player experience of this game are fantasy and challenge: By using pixel art elements and choosing the bunny as the character, I intended to make the game cute and relaxing. Moreover, in daily life, food makes people happy, especially desserts give people pleasure. The game intends to simulate eating dessert to create a satisfying feeling for the player. There are also challenges set in the game: the player needs to collect a certain amount of “right” dessert and manage to avoid the “wrong” ones to keep the game going and win. Players might accidentally misread the type of the dessert or collide with the wrong dessert accidentally when pressing the key. Overall, the player experience is supposed to be relaxing and nervous at the same time. The mechanics of the game include the navigation of the character and character’s collision with the dessert object. Through the collision, the player either keep the game moving forward or associated with the game rules reducing the time the game left. In addition, the game uses progression mechanics, the progress bar, to give player feedback on their progress, telling them the progress of the game and what part they need to work on. I also applied one of the concepts introduced in the class, tuning the game. In order to tune the game to not too easy or not too difficult, I adjusted the numbers in the game, like frequency of the generation of dessert objects, numbers of types of dessert, numbers of dessert players need to collect to win the game, etc. The types of desserts coming out of the machines are set to be random. After all, the amount of the dessert controls the time of the game, and the three lives the character has are designed to control the difficulty of the game. The design of the game was inspired by games like “sky burger,” one of the matching games, in which player try to match specific types of slices of a hamburger falling from the sky. Besides, I also combined the game with platform games, which player control the character to run and jump through the platform. However, in this game, unlike platform games, it doesn’t have a loop background, which enables the player to run through the world. Instead, I used conveyor belts to let the bunny run and collect objects along the way. Also, compared to other games may use “bomb” to reduce character lives, we used a different method. When first setting the game, we didn’t set any “obstacle” for the game, the player could only collect the desserts without any behavior hurt her lives, so it became a game which players will never lose. Then we decided to set “bomb” to control the gameplay, so players will lose if they make some kinds of mistake and collide with a certain amount of bomb. In the end, I figured out another method to increase the difficulty of the game, why don’t we just turn two types of the dessert(five in total) to serve as “bombs”, which also let the player spend time to distinguish and make sure which dessert she needs to collect other than just distinguish dessert and bomb. During the design of the game, I originally intended to make the chance of the appearance of every type of dessert the same(random), but the random setting in the software Construct apparently is not random. Even though it was set to be random, one of the types of dessert players need to collect appears less than the others do. During the playtest, this bug making the game a bit harder turns out to be a good thing to tune the game. Players who played the game got a bit frustrated when they lose the game and they wanted to try another time, and by the end, they were able to win the game after about two or three times of play. The difficulty seems to be right for the game. Between playtest, I also adjust the number of dessert players needs to collect and the period of time new dessert object to be created on screen.