M2 Artifact - Milestone Blog Report

Welcome back to our unnamed time capsule mystery game.

This past 3 weeks, we focused on creating paper and digital prototypes of the game along with concept art to get started with playtesting the mechanics and get feedback on not only our implementation of the mechanics of the game but also the concept art that we have decided on for the game. 

Prototyping Ideas

For our paper and digital prototype, we decided to combine both to test out mechanics that would end up working together in the final rendition of the game. These specific mechanics were the "Capture" or "Shoot" mechanic (focusing on capturing photos of the moments in-game), and the "Newspaper Crafting" that would decide on the ending score of the game. 

Capture Mechanic

The idea for the mechanic of capturing photos and it worked by pressing a button to go into capture mode, moving the camera around to get the subject of the photo in it properly, and then pressing another button to capture the photo that would go into your journal. We implemented this mechanic in Unity as our digital prototype for testing the photos that came out as shown in Figure 1. Figure 2 is how the scene appeared in Unity, and also allowed us to test the movement and get feedback on how it felt to the players.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Gathering Clues

In terms of solving the mystery of the prototype plot, playtesters required clues. The ways to gather clues were to take photos, talk to characters, or interact with items. Since we had not established a dialogue manager in our Unity Scene yet, the way we decided to implement the dialogues for the prototype was to have one of our team members to be the active character and interact with the playtesters in the way that the NPCs would talk. In this way, we were able to provide clue snippets to the playtesters through all 3 methods by providing them with the paper versions of these clues as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Newspaper Crafting

We had created multiple ideas of how we wanted to make the newspaper crafting or as we call it "newspaper builder." When it came to prototyping this mechanic, we decided that the best idea would be to let the players and playtesters use their imagination to their fullest to create a "juicy" newspaper and score it on the basis of how effective their use of photos and clues was together and how too much or too little information would make the newspaper readers irritated. Figure 4 and Figure 5 note two ways in which the two different teams of players decided to display the information they found about the "murder plot" of the prototype in a newspaper format. Figure 4 received a score of 100/100 and Figure 5 received a score of 98/100 losing two points to adding excess information that readers may not care about. 

Figure 4

Figure 5

Takeaways from Prototype Testing

Testing in this way was super fun for our team and very helpful to understand what players felt like when using these mechanics. We learned that the photo mechanic was not perfect and after zooming into the scene would follow character motion instead of zoomed in motion, feeling unnatural and not the best for positioning the photos. We also learned that people preferred the newspaper builder in the way we implemented it instead of giving them guidelines on where to present what kind of information. Their ways of crafting the newspaper also showed us that clues and photos were not 1:1 or even many:1. Multiple clues could point to one photo, multiple photos could point to one clue and multiple photos and multiples clues could work together in amazing ways. This allowed us to get a better idea of how our implementation of the newspaper builder should feel like in game. 

What to expect

With the Milestone 3 starting, expect us to complete the tutorial version of the game with a more in depth scoring mechanic for the newspaper, a finalized design for how the newspaper crafting would look like, an updated photo mechanic, and the implementation of the dialogue manager! A lot of our own art would be included in this tutorial demo version, so look forward to that too.

Here's some sneaks of our concept art to keep you satisfied while we ask you to wait :)

General Store (part time Bar)