Collaborating and project management
This game is processed in collaboration. Our division of work is listed below:
Xintong Ye: art style, all visual and audio resources, scene building.
Yang Hong: logic structure, numerical design, copywriting, coding.
Concepts and game mechanics are discussed together by the two people.
Using Unity as the game-making engine and Plastic SCM as well as google sheets to collaborate.
Work is divided into tasks with a deadline in Google Excel as well. Discussions and meetings are arranged while needed.
Progress, playtests, and meetings
27/04/2022
Discussed the largeness of the game. Voted down the idea that providing several choices regarding real eras or areas, for controlling the workload as well as avoiding bringing subjective prejudgment towards actual countries or cultures into the game.
Initially decided which contents to contain and how to make them playable whilst combining well with each other.
01/05/2022
Searched for the real historical events as references, as well as sociology literature in helping build the model.
04/05/2022
1. Discussed the initial birth rate and the players’ target, if it is to make the birth rate increase or just not let it decrease too low. The latter was chosen as it’s better to be recognised.
2. Discussed whether to add a money system to completely change the game mechanic, in dealing with the current problem that the players can keep clicking on the “approve” or “reject” button without thinking anything if they would like to. An achievement system was raised up as well, left for later to see if we have time to do it.
3. Five endings were decided. They are “riot”, “new technology”, “high power government”, “go back to the history” and “the player did nothing”.
4. Both agreed and decided to make a flat background sound without any tune to help build the feeling of the surrounding.
5. Discussed whether to add a UI function bar on the top of the main UI. A menu scene was finally decided instead, for showing the pure playing scene without too much distraction.
13/05/2022 – Playtest 1
1. The three tabs of line graphs were complaint be hard to click. A paratactic design might be applied after discussion with Xintong.
2. The glowing spots on the map were not that obvious to successfully call clicks from all the players.
3. Several playtesters mentioned the gameplay mode made them recall the games Papers Please and the Reigns. We referred Papers Please before, but hadn’t looked into the Reigns. A try to the Reigns was added to our plan.
4. One of the playtesters left a comment, “Looks like the game is trying to make the world better. It is interesting, although the main interesting thing is those outside the game mechanic.” I thought he was right. We should try more to improve our game mechanics, and not be satisfied with the “interesting content”.
25/05/2022 – Playtest 2
1. Text was too hard to read. There was too much text on the same page and the players might not have the patience to read them over.
2. A display problem with the font was found. The text looked vague in the Unity playing window.
3. Maddy and David suggested that if the detailed text of the news is not important, then it was better to make it just lines or even remove it. The advice was accepted.
4. The news looked not that like news. A newspaper look might be applied to make more sense.
5. The current scale of the line graphs was too small and thus could not cause the players’ attention and looked more like decorations. Planned to make it able to be clicked to enlarge later.
27/05/2022
1. Discussed and adjusted the composing of modules as well as the visual style, decided to change it from plate 2D to 2.5D or 3D with new elements added.
2. Discussed how to deliver the achievement: tube and little sculpture (birds on sticks) or electric clock (8 bit).
3. Discussed how to show the growing line with limited space on the graph. Xintong raised we could make it shrink at the x-axis as time goes by. Don’t know how to realise with code yet.
4. In every round, there will be random policies, and the players may not survive to be able to play through all of the policies, so it can be said that there are rogue-like elements in our game. Then it should be important to give a summary for the players after each time playing through the game. Also, it should be better if the players can check the former rounds’ data. But that involved storing data locally and I’m afraid I don’t have time to learn.
30/05/2022
1. New scene panels were brought forward. The one on the right side in the picture above was finally chosen, as the elements were more concentrated and it was more readable for the players.
2. In responding to the text problem raised on 25/05 Playtest 2, policies were divided into three pages, the title page, the background page and the method page.
3. Discussed how to solve the problem that the policies, which are the main playing objects, are also the most boring things in the game with long formal text. A function to let the players be able to make annotation was raised but voted down as we can’t give proper feedback to an annotation. Localisation to avoid some language barrier, as well as some funny self-talking by the character that the players are controlling to highlight some main information and call the players’ interest, have been finally decided added.
4. Discussed whether to make a tutorialisation at the beginning. Finally, we decided to use indirect hints as guidance and check if they work in the later playtests.
01/06/2022
1. Initially set up a localisation system allowing players to choose between English and Chinese.
2. An animation of a file being thrown onto the working place from outside of the scene was accidentally made, sooner I realised it can be a guide to encourage the player to click it at the beginning. A mini discussion was later held in which we decided to keep that animation. Further polished work was handed over to Xintong.
3. We realized working in the same scene at the same time on Plastic CSM can be dangerous as changes may conflict and some may be lost because of that. We decided to check with each other every time to avoid that happening.
01/06/2022 – Playtest 3
1. There was one playtester who didn’t notice the animation of the files.
2. All the playtesters firstly caught attention by the huge glowing back screen, and then the glowing electric clock. Glowing objects were much easier to get the players’ sight.
3. Several players reported that they did have a feeling of checking official documents. But the surrounding didn’t make them feel like working as a chairman with huge power, but more like a poor guy being put in a dark room to do a room escape.
4. One of our colleagues raised some advice, mentioning that we can add some change to the character’s working place along with the game going through, to make the players get better feedback as well as realise the years passing by.
5. It was hard to avoid the others onlooking while a playtester was testing, which might influence the effects while the others begin to playtest.
6. After playtesting, while discussing feedback 3, we realised there was a conflict between Xintong and me. She thought the character that the players were controlling was a clerk without a huge power, more like that in Papers Please, while in my imagination, the character’s power was similar to an administrator, more like that in Reigns. We discussed that and finally decided it influenced not severe and we can leave this to the players.
04/06/2022
Brought up a more interesting idea about the game mechanics: to give the players different phrases and let the players combine them by themselves to produce policies. For example, [forcing]/[encouraging]/[banning]/[launching] + [women]/[pregnants women]/[single mothers]/[bachelors] + [seeking professional development]/[abortion]/[paying more taxes]/[getting married].
Discussed if a government tax income could be added into the game as “the money that can be used”, as a new mechanic to let the players think about the strategy, also as a limit to prevent the players from clicking “approve” or “reject” without reading anything and quickly going through the whole game.
Both ideas were finally abandoned for now because of the time limit and left for further development after the submission.
12/06/2022
1. The requirement of using different fonts for different languages has been reached by using Fallback List adding to the default language. It was not the most steady solution. Also, there were a few words that could not be displayed normally, with the Console Warning Line saying “can not find the relevant word in all fallback font assets”, while there should be those words there. A more steady solution should be found later if there’s time left.
2. A new scene with the same structure but different textures as well as the back screen was raised by Xintong, in consideration of the “feeling” issue mentioned by several players in Playtest 3.
3. Multiple empty objects were used to detect clicking. The positions have been adjusted during testings to remove the influences by the visual angle as well as the 3D ray.
16/06/2022
1. Tried to use constructors to store different properties of the policies, later found it’s hard to be called as an entirety. The definition of List was finally applied.
17/06/2022
1. Solved the problem “the cursors show not the same on different PCs”.
2. In responding to the font problem mentioned on 12/06, all TextMeshPros have been changed to sprites to ensure the localisation working well.
19/06/2022
1. Compared to the line renderer, the trail renderer was finally chosen in realising the line graphs, as it matched the script of counting the change of status better.
2. Realised the misunderstanding between Xintong and me. A new scene from Xintong’s check-in changes was downloaded before, which I thought was an update of the visual style in responding to playtest 3’s feedback towards visual feelings, while she told me it was the response to another feedback on playtest 3, in which one of our colleagues suggested changing our scene according to the applied policies to give an obvious change to stimulate the players.
That was a huge problem as for most of the work I only did them in the later scene. Additional logic of both scripts and the game mechanic should also be produced if we were making the game as Xintong’s idea. We finally had to give up the first scene and turned all the content to the after scene.
22/06/2022 – Playtest 4
1. As predicted, the feedbacks were not enough, and the existing ones were not obvious enough as well. One player said “I can’t feel the people really living there. I feel like I’m just handling with data.”
2. The content gradually appearing on the background board was too easy to get blocked out by the main playing parts, plus, the appearing time of that content was arranged with a random range, so it was very often that some of the content was ignored. That was planned to be adjusted later to let the new content appear only if no policies or line graphs are open.
3. Some players mentioned the red cursor brought them a dangerous feeling. This situation sounds reasonable and the cursor was changed to a green one.
4. One of the playtesters misunderstood the function of the news and people’s stories appearing on the background board and thought they were new things that need to be dealt with.
5. Some players might like to change the pages back and forth, while we have only the function to change forward. That will be added if there is still time after all the bugs are resolved.
6. During playtesting there seemed to be a random bug that showed additional texts while the players opened new policies. After a long time of debugging after the playtest, we finally realized that was because some players had clicked the files more than once a time before the papers showed up.
which was the reason why some texts show up unexpectedly
7. One-half of the players didn’t really read the sentences in the menu scene carefully, but still, successfully know what they should do, which demonstrated that our guidance in both interaction and gaming aims has worked.
8. All of our playtesters preferred our last version of visual style, the elements they liked including but not limited to the map and the sense of technology.
9. One of our colleagues pointed out that we paid too much attention to adjusting the visual presentation continuously during the whole developing period, but these problems should have been avoided before the prototyping stage had done. We thought that was a precise critique.
22/06/2022
1. Several texts and coding problems have been fixed.
2. In response to the series of issues found from the process of playtesting 4, the line graphs, which are one of the essential objects but too possible to be ignored, are moved from the background board to the desk. A shake animation to those line graphs is also applied at the beginning of the game to call the players’ attention. Besides, the way of adding news and people’s stories is changed from replacing to overlying, to make it more obvious to the players as well as dividing the interactive and noninteractive areas thoroughly.
3. According to the advice from David, red lines are added as thresholds in the line graph to help the players recognize the ranges in which they should ensure the rates be in and hence clarify the gaming target.
After
In the upcoming summer, we are planning to remake this game with the former visual style and a better mechanic to give the players more space to use their subjective initiative, to let the players produce policies by themself, not only reading prolix texts and clicking “approve” or “reject”.