After Playtest Day, on Monday, we went through all moments in the game experience granularly from a narrative standpoint, so that we can focus on tightening up the entire structure and solve the core UX problems that deter player’s attention from story consumption.
A Moment-by-moment design document
Since our goal is to balance gameplay novelty of the medium from the puzzle solving moments, but also provide spaces for players to understand the story content through the bits and pieces within the game.
Essentially, we want the player to know that:
- Naiad is a space explorer whose spaceship has crashed on Earth during an expedition.
- She has an archeology background, an interest taken from her mother, who gave her knowledge and inspiration to seek her origin, Earth.
- A robot is found on Earth, and they used to help human beings find refuge after the apocalypse, even though they are presented more as a villain at the start.
- Items from her past intersect the past of human origins through the two items: camera and watch
Using playtest day videos, we mapped every game scene with the framework of questions:
- What does the players see?
- What can the players do?
- Player question queue?
- Narrative questions answered?
Then, we reached this detailed moment-by-moment mapping of final full experience.
The major change we made was making the 3 puzzle lock into two and repurposing the compass puzzle to after the Robot Puzzle, the movement sequence towards the church, which will allow us to show past images of the refugees that Naiad will discover along the way. We also finally filled the Earth puzzle moment with the actual puzzle instead of the original placeholder. Our ending sequence is coming into view!
The rest of the week is then to fully build this out in preparation for next week’s playtest night. Our goal is that this week tightens the narrative, and next week we’ll be able to focus on UX issues, focusing especially on those that take away player narrative consumption cognitive energy!
Art for the final scene
Since we have the spaceship scene ready, now it’s time to create the next major scene asset for the old city (taking inspiration from New York), where the human refugees lived in and where the church Naiad will enter in the last scene is. Now that there is only 2 pieces of puzzle that make up the Robot puzzle, the original sunset image is replaced by a disjointed image that allows for one phone to transform to the compass and the map to go to the church.
We also had a discussion on what the church 3D scene should look like. Since the church is set in the city and is essentially an ordinary building that was used as a church for refugees, where the robot would guide humans to, we wanted the city to be believable as a major city (modeled after New York City). We also wanted the buildings to be around 10,000 years old (which is why Naiad and her mother don’t know about Earth’s history — it’s archeology!)
Mural scene segmented by how many phones there will be
Added diaglogue
Further developed old city / church scene with the same color scheme
Next steps
And of course our programmers are putting together every individual puzzles with the new structures. Next Tuesday, we’ll have the playtest for this first full experience from start to finish! Stay tuned!