Over the weekend, some team members read through Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and realized how in fact, finding the “idioms” for our form, is the crucial step to creation for our artform / medium.

For us, we have been stuck defining the form, which was why our idioms does not ground us. In fact, after reading this comic, we made a bold decision

WE NEED TO GET OUR FORM DOWN IN ORDER TO FIND OUR IDIOM TO SHOWCASE OUR CRAFT AND TELL THE STORY OF OUR PURPOSE

Each chapter of Understanding Comics actually serve as inspirations for different functions for the team.

Puzzle Design

Having been inspired by Understanding Comics about how to evolve our understanding for this medium, continuing from last week knowing that puzzles are our hamburger meat to be encapsulated by narrative components expressed through repositioning, our hamburger buns, it was time to find the main complex puzzle from our proposed linear script!!

Different people designed different puzzles, but mainly the golden triangle of script + comic art + puzzle mechanic started working on the first moment on the script: the solar wind introduction.

4 distinct settings from the script was confirmed, and they will be slowly translated to our final experience:

• outer space with spaceship
• inside of spaceship
• marooned planet
• marooned planet’s past

Script

An insight came that in fact, since comic art encompasses the objects the script informs, and puzzles require keyword objects to work with, the pipeline goes: script -> comic art translation -> puzzle mechanic informed by the art.

Comic strip translation

Puzzle idea

The power of the golden triangle of script, comic art, and puzzle mechanics come form: when one of these functions come up with an idea, the other can yes, and to the idea, and co-develop the next step. In this case, the comic visualization gave rise to how the phones move (the repositioning), and that informs how content is communicated across frames for narrative to design.

And with the synergy between a spaceship opening wings puzzle idea came the design of what the spaceship should look like visually.

And these formalized into the puzzle moment where, if the player opens the wings of the spaceship, it will block the solar wind that is making the ship unsafe to move. Once the wings are open, our main character Naiad can enter her ship, and the story progresses.

Further on, because of how helpful this comic translation process was, the visual development function decided to visualize the entire script from start to finish, shown below.

Other explorations beyond the golden triangle puzzle design

Outside of the script -> comic -> puzzle translation, there were attempts in the onboarding side, trying to answer the question of how players learn the main mechanic of connecting phones together. In fact, this clarified to the team how narrative works with puzzle design. It is the showcase of the spaceship going across the screen, like how a long take (a cinematic language for scene movements that doesn’t cut) always introduces new content regardless if the camera moves. In order for us to utilize our medium well, and have profound story for the narrative, the newly introduced frames always have to include a narrative component.

There was also another attempt for the solar wind puzzle moments from the direction of tutorials: if zooming in and out of a scene has to be introduced to the players, a possible puzzle is having the solar wind lines being activation method for a spaceship entrance lock. It is through matching of the lines metaphorically, making connections between a line in the game world, to a puzzle input, that the players learn about visual matching and a sequence of zoom in, zoom out, match actions. However, this did not further development at that time as tutorial sequence has to be rethought about AFTER the design in set. It was still a good exploration!

More Tech prototypes

Sometime between last week and this week, our system programmer refined the architecture of a moments-based game, where instead of a phone connection functionality component being added to game objects one by one, it now changed to an event structure, where a connection event would be broadcasted to the scene, and listener objects who are involved would answer. This helps with separation of concerns for our “moments-based” game structure, so that an object hat has changed connection type during different moments, would not have to dynamically add and take away components themselves, but only do so when prompted by a central commander.

In addition, preparing for our first playtest next week, a system for registering swipe as connection activation entry, and a “pick-up” motion detection mechanism for players to get feedback on when the phone disconnects, is created.

Other than that, we played with other possibilities the phone has:

Drag prototype

Satellite prototype

Gyroscope prototype

2D in 3D test

Miscellaneous

Next steps

So you see, week 4 is filled with puzzle design, tech foundation, and content exploration. There is one thing missing: the player perspective, so next week is playtest night, the first time we’d bring our ideas to actual users. Please look forward to our discoveries.