M3 Artifact - Milestone Report

Welcome back to another update on the time capsule mystery game.

We’ve spent the past few weeks designing and iterating over the mechanics of capturing photos, building the newspaper, creating a tutorial scene for the game’s writing, clues, and capture mechanic. We also started adding the art for the game into the scenes.

Along with the tutorial scene, we included the first major clue and dialogue around that clue to showcase the dialogue as the major “mechanic” of our game. As the players made their way through the introduction of the Capture mechanic and learned about the introductory plot of our game, we asked them to think aloud about their thoughts so we could understand better where our intended mechanics were intuitive and where they felt like something was missing or something that we as developers intended was missed by them.

In terms of the art, everyone who playtested our game stated that they enjoyed the artstyle that we had chosen to go for, and that “it fit the vibe of the game.” This was also the first time we were testing the in-game dialogue mechanic so responses about the dialogues as well as the UI and UX of the implemented dialogue system was very important to us. People mentioned that the continue button on the bottom left was too far and annoying to click in a game that is mostly played with just the keys on a keyboard, and they brought up the suggestion of using a key like spacebar as another way of letting you continue the dialogue. They also mentioned issues that can be assigned as accessibility issues with the UI not being dark enough to see the dialogue properly. In terms of the camera mechanic, we slowed down the sudden shifts in the camera that were happening in our earlier playtest, and players found no inherent problems with the shift in the camera during this playtest, so we take that as a win. We noticed that the journal could be opened while in camera mode, and that the camera could be used to peek outside of the bounds that we allowed the players to move in, so those will also be changes that we are looking into.

Most of the dialogue seemed to be understood as well as we imagined it to be, and that gave us confidence in writing the next part of the game. Overall, I’d say the feedback was extremely valuable to understand what to focus on next, and helps us scope out the next couple weeks until the end of the semester. 

Look forward to the next post, and here are some photos from this prototype.