It’s quarters week this week, a time when faculty walkaround project rooms to understand the initial explorations and subsequent development directions. Yet, what our medium looks like to us is still fuzzy (not vague, but too many directions), even with the overall structure being a linear narrative, and the technical gold spikes / storyboards for different mechanics / puzzle moments! We know our next step is to come up with “moments” that go with our world building, and narrative techniques that works with the 4-phone medium, so that we have a first set of prototypes to test.

We first explored more on how content can be displayed on our medium, then came up with a important game structure describing the relationship between narrative and puzzle moments that we called “hamburger”, and finally going deep into puzzle design, including ones on paper and one that is our experiment for incorporating 3D to 2D transition.

Narrative repositioning – “Camera” movement to phone movement

The first thing we’ve got this week is to get a visual feel of how pictures or visual content can be displayed on modular phones that get repositioned. Using Moebius’s comic strips, a strong reference for us from during pitch, we put phones on top of it, to see how story flow is indicated visually. One main insight was: people follow a visual focal point, so when an animation of a person goes to the right of the phone, it is natural for players to connect a phone on the right side, to see what happens next!

This gives our narrative designer inspiration on how to introduce characters and the potential “camera movement” language for our design space!

Visual metaphors – to change scenes!

Building on the visual focal point from the narrative side, a huge focus for this project is the pictorial element, so our visual designer came up with a storyboard that showcases the following:

• Phone is used as a phone (phone UI is breaking the fourth wall — a feature we find extremely interesting, also as an artistic statement for creating a 4 phone game that seeks to bring together 4 people in person)
• A character’s hair that cuts off at the edge of a phone, prompting players to connect another phone to it.
• The hair that visually transform into the lines that a spaceship leaves when propelling forward.
• The scene that truly changed from a character’s hair to her journey on a spaceship.

Hamburger Structure – our big puzzle moment

This might sound confusing at first, but we decided that puzzles should be our main moment where mechanics shine! (This will be an obsolete statement a few weeks later as we discover that the mechanics are actually what connects everything from narrative and puzzle together)

What is a Hamburger structure! [missing picture go take picture in project room]

• Simply, a hamburger consists of buns on top and bottom, this will be the role of our narrative repositioning contents.
• The main attraction is actually the meat: the puzzle moments will be supported and transitioning in and out by the narrative moments.
• Any secondary are the lettuces and tomatoes.

Our instructor Dave pointed out that in fact, not all people go to a hamburger for the meat, but for the buns. We were not sure what to make about this at that time, but intuitively, this was the first step we got towards our understanding of the system of this medium.

Puzzle design pipeline

With the hamburger structure, we have a puzzle design pipeline: a golden triangle with puzzles coming up with mechanics, narrative co-developing for how the pieces came to be, and visual design envisioning how the contents get presented on the phones.

Showcase for the designs and explorations this week

Light and shadow

Light and shadow took inspiration from the cog rotating mechanic from Gorogoa, having phones repositioning to change how an eclipse-like sunlight blocking creates shadow, which would change how the phones light up.

Timelapse

Taking inspiration from narrative repositioning, timelapse is an over game structure where the main character collects items in a main “lobby” scene, and through phone repositioning of the sun, it changes the time of the scenes, which reveals more relics to go into and solve. However, as this interferes with how narrative can be structured, it did not get further developed.

Clock and snow

Inspired by the time theme of timelapse, when a phone shows a snowing scene, and another shows a clock that has clock-hands needing to get to another position, if players bring the snow to above the clock, the weight of the snow would change the positions of the clock-hands, effectively getting to a puzzle objective.

2D in 3D

As of currently, our goal is to have narrative be in 2D sequences and puzzles a mix of 2D and 3D, to utilize our talents in both artistic departments. With that, our 3D artist explored a mechanic that brings 3D to a 2D scene, anchored by searching for a 2D symbol in a 3D scene, so transitions between two artistic styles can be smooth.

Here’s how it works: With a bit of shaders applied, colorful 3D scenes change colors as you rotate a camera perspective on an individual phone. When all 4 phones discover the right perspectives, when brought together, those unified colors show the final 2D symbol, which is the opportunity to transition to a 2D scene.

A script

Our narrative designer created a full script form our worldbuilding and the current explorations. Our explorer Naiad starts on the spaceship and onto Earth to discover what happened to the past. Having a script outlines where puzzle moment opportunities exist.

Here’s an excerpt.

A new communication rule: the conch

As a team filled with infinite ideas, it turned out that why many ideas float without grounding in actionable items, was because we were yes, and-ing each other so much, that all new arguments get expanded to another, which leads to another, and never returning to the original argument. In order to bring structure to this team, we came up with a communication rule: only the person with the throwable stress ball dice can speak. And this will externalize our ideas floating in air and ground each us. We call it the conch, as it took inspiration from the Lord of the Flies. We tried it, and it was oh so helpful to ground us!

Here’s a dedicated photo of our conch.

Quarters slide

Quarters was in between the above, and it was shown in a much flowier method, where team members chime in for each topic whenever a faculty raised questions for different departments. Our presentation was received extremely positively: the possibilities were infinite but exciting, and we have been making good explorations towards utilizing the medium.

Here is the slides we used for reference.

Next steps

And this concludes week 3. Next weeks, we’ll be finding our hamburger meat puzzle by following the script puzzle opportunities! Off to more explorations of how content can be showcased on this medium!! See you next week.