Yang Hong’s Development Log

Winds, Mountain, Lake (Unity Physics Engine Game/An Interactive Picture)

---

Aims and Objectives

While doing the Physics Engine prototype, I was interested in recording players trail on the scene so that they can have different experiences every time they play through the game. Thus, a Chinese ink painting background was settled as it’s more abstract with less colour which might provide players space to draw something with the trail. After the background was done, I realised it could be also suitable for An Interactive Picture. I was influenced by that realisation, and the category of this game by the end was to some extent at the middle of these two.

Processing

The disappearing of background and the control of wind zones functions were carried out by SetActive in scripts. I stuck by here for some time, before learning that if I added the scripts straightly to the objects themselves with setting SetActive to false at the Start part, the whole objects with their components wouldn’t be called again regardless of what was in the Update part, and the solution was adding the scripts to another object such as the main camera.

Playtest feedback and reflection

As it’s a Zen feeling game and there’s a thought “It’s fine to have something or not” in Zen, in the first version, I let the clouds only instruct where the winds directed. Players were required to try with the mindset of targetless to understand what would happen by pressing the “Space” button. As a result, the player felt confused while playtesting, which I thought mainly because the ink drop might not be at the wind zone while the player was pressing the button.

After that, my idea of adjusting was making the clouds collisionable and the ink drop could be influenced by both winds and clouds. Still, the player felt confused and started to guess whether the only controllable things are the clouds and have no idea about wind zones. I compromised for a while, tried to really let the clouds be only controllable, before realising it against the original intention of making a Zen feeling game to let the players try. I figured I should be able to keep my original version if I adjust the number, scale and position of the wind zones and put some guides at the beginning or when finding players struggling. In addition, I also learnt that the player wouldn’t actively try to draw something with the ink drop, for the reason that it is difficult to control, the “clouds instruction” is only a one-time show, and the player cannot see the specific location of the wind area. But good feedback was that the player did regard the experience be nice in the aesthetic aspect.

If I redo this prototype, I believe I’ll start it with An Interactive Picture. As the core thought of this prototype does not match Unity Physics Engine Game very well, and if sorting it into Interactive Picture, there should be some more interesting ways to interact.

The Priestess in Cage (An Escape Room Puzzle or Challenge)

^{* This is a collaborative project by Xintong Ye and Yang Hong.}

---

Aims, project management and outcome

At first, what we hoped to make looked like a fruit machine, with three windows that show some different stages of three specific objects in a rolling way. Besides, there’re three buttons for scene choosing and a button for stopping the stages from rolling. What players need to do is to hit the buttons when applicable matches happen, thus they can get several lines of a narrative poem as the hint to get access to the next step of the whole escape room challenge. This design came from a worldview that we constructed inspired by Borges, in which the concept of ‘time’ didn’t exist in the objective world but every individual. All the individuals could decide the speed of time of themselves and loop in their own time circle, but different individuals were still able to touch each other and make stories happen.

The narrative poem, at first, was not essential but a romantic interest of us. After adjusting it happened to be the most important part. As the first version was confirmed not easy to be implemented in a physical escape room later, in addition, hard for players to realise the complex worldview simply through this design, this puzzle finally came to the current version.

In the final version, players automatically get several parts of a narrative poem, which, in a whole challenge, should be found from the previous scenes. They can find switchable paintings and three clock-like items on the wall, representing three ‘individuals’ – the priestess, the lord, and a pile of dust, with different stages on the dial plate to point at. Players change the scenes and move the pointers to make matches according to the poem and gain utensils for taking out the heart from the priestess sculpture in the room to escape.

1. It was hard for all the testing players to locate the mention of dust in the poem, as the stages changed too dramatic, for instance, from dust to a crucible. Things showed better when the ‘individuals’ were human beings, but there were still problems – players might develop different understanding from the verbal hint, for example, whether ‘powerful’ referred to a priestess at her younger or elder age, as someone might imagine physical power whilst others imagine magic power.

2. There’re 6 parts in total. For the first part, we didn’t make it simple enough to make it as a guide, and that brought confusion to some players who started trying to combine the different parts, which would lead to an impasse. Also, the addition of scenes made it more complex which shall be discussed whether to be kept.

3. As this prototype relies extremely on the text and neither of the designers is an English native speaker, it hinders the players more when it comes to the English version rather than the Chinese one. If we redesign this prototype, a localization such as a polish or even rewriting should be rigid demand.

Other

This prototype shares the same narrative content with The Priestess in Cage (Twine or Bisty Narrative Game). By applying the same story we are trying to experience and compare the different constructing ways of storytelling in different game types.

Flatworm (Avoid and Collect Game)

---

Aims and Objectives

This game is inspired by a kind of creature called flatworm, which has infrequent behaviours that can metaphor some topics regarding feminism and child borning. Species like them are hermaphroditic and have a mating behaviour called penis fencing. When doing this, they try to insert their extendable two-headed dagger-like stylets into each other’s bodies in order to pierce their epidermis and inject sperm. The one who loses at this fencing is forced to be the mother.

Processing

At first, I planned to make a single-player game and add some robot flatworms for the player to fight with. The player touches the other’s skin with his/her stylet and keeps it for half a second, to collect one point, and lose a life by getting inserted by the others.

But for the reason I mention below, by the end, the prototype is made suitable for two players and they can control each of the flatworms separately by inputting “A, W, S, D, Q, E” and “J, I, K, L, U, O”.

Playtest feedback

1) Players regarded this game more as a fighting game rather than a collect and avoid game; 2) The two control key parts on the keyboard are close to each other and one of the players may have to use the weak hand to play; 3) Players might want to change their situation as well as rotate at the same time, and it might be better if it’s designed for two hands; 4) While colliding with the frame, there might be unexpectable long-last spinning with fast speed which would make the flatworms lose control.

Besides, there was a huge bug: the control of the two flatworms was with different logic in moving. One could still move horizontal or vertical after turning its rotate, but for another one, if the player turned 45 degrees and press “L” to move right, the actual moving direction would be 45 + 90 = 135 degrees.

Reflection

This is my first digital game prototype. I spent too much time thinking about the visual style, which is not the thing I’m good at. After trying two to three styles on different objects, I finally found I was not satisfied with any of them and didn’t have more time for it. Thus I had to straightly put the different styles of objects together which made the final work a complete mess. Another problem is I hadn’t mastered the fluid-related applying method of Unity yet. The feeling of rigidity on what was supposed to be a soft flatworm made it badly shown.

Some of the functions planned for the prototype to simulate those in a complete game were abandoned. For e.g., flatworm stylets could be alternately set to exist and non-exist to achieve the floating effect of flatworms’ bodies. But none of those was realised for the same reason. These made me realize, for game design, more emphasis should be focused on the implementation and testing of the gameplay itself during the prototyping stage.

If I redo this prototype, I’ll consider making it in 3D, and collaborate with a fellow student who is adept at 3D animation, or after I myself have gained enough skills and aesthetic level in that area.

the INITIALs (A Game with only 18 Cards)

---

Aims and Objectives

More and more abbreviations are used in daily communications both in the Chinese and English world in recent years, such as “IDK” for the whole sentence “I Don’t Know”. But for those who are not familiar with specific context or culture, an abbreviation can be expanded to everything, e.g., for the example ‘IDK’, it may also refer to “important duck killer” or “I drag Kaiser”.

At first, there’s only the wild version, and no additional rules were added except what to do if someone raise up an unreasonable sentence. Many problems were shown by playtesting.

1. Sometimes there would be a stasis as no one can figure out a way to connect the cards;

2. Someone tried to use the same word which can be widely applied (e.g. small, I), continuously during the rounds;

3. In the more players version, there was always someone(s) who cannot participate in as much as the others, and they would tend to give up along when time went by;

4. When came nearly to the end, the one who was about to win would have to hold more than 15 cards in hand, which is not a comfortable experience;

5. It took time longer than expected, as most of the times one of the players can take back all of the cards, thus it can not be very fast to come to the end and decide the final winner;

6. In the version of the English playtest, players with high familiarity with `the language were more possible to react fast (which is as expected though, as this is a game relying strongly on language using).

Also, I was cautioned by David for making some simple visual marks on the cards, to distinguish the top from the bottom, for preventing players from being confused as some letters are symmetrical with each other.

Accordingly, rules were adjusted and added, details can be found in my video. But the unbalanced participating problem still exists and can not be ignored after all the adjusting.

Under the tester’s suggestion, a different rule, “each player says an answer, and finally, the person who raises the most interesting answer takes all the cards”, is tried. It is a good way to get everyone involved, but also adds subjectivity to the success or failure of the game, making it demands more on the participants (e.g. you have to understand the meaning behind the sentences everyone puts forward, including those unfamous ones), and for each round players need to wait for everyone to complete their answer and organize a vote, which makes a single round of playtime much more longer.

After trying and adjusting, the final version kept the adjusted first version as a “wild version”. A different way to play called the “mild version”, which makes every player have an equal chance of participating in the game, was added as another choice for players. Besides, for two to three players, they can specify at the beginning that one round ends when the sentence increases to how many words. However, this version has been no more tested, and it is not sure what kind of problems may occur.

Would You Like a Pot of Electric Spider Plants? （Procedural Art)

---

Aims and Objectives

My various experiences on failing growing plants made me feel like there could be random results for non-professional people on plants issue, while for procedural art “random” is also an important feature. This game aims to let the players gain random electric spider plants with no pain, as no real plant will die for these.

Playtest and feedback

In the first version, there could be a huge difference in the length of the leaves in the same pot. For example, one was extremely long, and the rest was almost absent, which didn’t look very harmonious. For improving this, the random ranges were adjusted to make all the producing more average. In addition, sprites are divided into different groups with different scripts to make the leaves face different directions for a more natural-looking.

By the end of this project, I realized maybe a common random value can be applied for all the seeds, and each group of the seeds share another common random value beyond that, to make the whole plant looks more reasonable and at the same time achieve the target of “dramatically random”.

(One player without English as mother language reported that the font of the words was not that easy to be recognised. More reports may need before deciding whether it needs to be adjusted.)

Reflection

The current way to realise is to add Trail Renderers with a long destruction time to several unseeable sprites as the seeds and ask the sprites to move by parabola function with a random range, which is not that steady (i.e. players may find the plants fading out if they keep the procedure running for a long time). Another thing is there’s no control set between the position and the growth direction of the leaves, and that may sometimes lead to some inaesthetic cross. All these above needs to be optimized when perfecting in the future.

My original idea is, to make some of the plants seem just sprouting, some show flourishes, some look like they need to be treated. In order to totally realise these, some more precise calculations, as well as a range control, are needed. In addition, in the future version, I’m thinking of adding an “Another one!” button as well as a picture base of previous plants, for players to produce as many plants as they like and to check what they have produced at any time.

If this can go further than a prototype, I may consider changing it to “Would you like a pot of electric plants?”, and both which kind of plants and how lush the plants the player will get is random. Special sounds of ‘electric’ plant growth may also be made applied to make it a more complete experience.

Aims and Objectives

This is a narrative game in which players can take different roles and rebuild what had happened by looping in the narrative structure, kind of like the novel Rashōmon by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. For a more purposeful experience, characters are settled with different main gaming targets according to their stories, for example, “to keep alive by the end” or “to find a way to solve the problem”.

At first, this game was designed to be suitable for 2 players, while the players’ choices influences each other’s further story step by step. But this was finally deprecated and turned to character choosing at the beginning, as according to playtest, two players’ storylines showing on the same screen with less UI would bring confusion and disturb players’ experience. This idea might be better to be applied with some engines other than twine.

Tutorialisation and visual direction

A simple guide like “click to look around” is set up at the beginning to provide knowledge on how to operate for players who have never been with this type of game.

Coloured the text of different endings in red or green, going along with the style of storytelling, to imply whether the ending is bad or good.

1. For the first version we worked out, according to a player’s feedback, there’s no sufficient worldview information for players who are trying to understand what’s happening at the beginning of the game. In addition, before players realise that the story belongs to another world, they prefer to imagine it the happens in the real world of the day. In that case, those options will be too calm as the characters are facing murder. And thus it will keep them feeling weird until they get enough information.

In response to these, 1. the beginning has been lengthened to give the player an adjustment process; 2. a considerable number of descriptions of the characters’ psychological activities have been added to complement the background and give the player a proper direction to imagine.

2. There is no lack of storylines that tread different paths but lead to the same destination. After players got familiar with that, they would tend to drop straightly back while seeing options with an alike look to previous ones. Up to now, there isn’t much influence to be found about this matter, except that the estimated gameplay time might be shortened.