Gameplay Mechanic a Month: Observation
Month 4 - April 2013
Mechanic Description:
Solve a mystery by using your powers of observation. Read a story one line at a time and decide whether each line is worth remember or forgetting. Edit your memories to find different endings.
This mechanic uses a simple text adventure/interactive story setting to encourage players to notice what they are reading. Normal mystery novels are solved without the player having to do any work at all. Here, players must observe what they are reading and decide which lines are important and which ones are not.
Playable in the following game:
The Tree Mysteries Part One: Marie's Mr Right
Platform:
Web
Genre:
Interactive story
Game Description:
You play as a young woman named Marie. You and your housemates had a dinner party last night and you can't seem to remember everything that happened. You have an enigmatic phone message about Mr Right and it seems that Mr Right might not be your boyfriend! Talk to your housemates to find out who Mr Right is and listen to their opinions about your love life. Choose whether or not to listen to your friends, follow your heart, follow your mind or a little of everything.
For this implementation, the story was written in a spreadsheet and can be switched out for another story completely. That is, the code is entirely independent on the story being told. The syntax requires the spreadsheet to specify the conditions for which each passage of text is valid based on what the player has "remembered" and which passages have already been seen by the player. This means that if desired, the code framework can be used to create an entirely different game about different people and different mysteries.
Screenshots:
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Each line of the story is presented one at a time. Players choose to "remember" or "forget" each line. |
If you miss a clue you need to re-read the last passage to find out what you missed. |
Gameplay Instructions:
- Click on the link to the web version of the game below.
- Use your keyboard to read through the story one line at a time.
- The settings menu should allow you to "save" a game, although it will only last for duration of your play session.
Downloads:
There is a Unity web player version of the implemented game.
Other Comments and Considerations:
The story behind this game was inspired by the idea called "The Curious Case of the Tree in the Living Room", created for my Idea a Week Project.
Analysis:
An analysis of the gameplay mechanic written by me in March 2015.
Context: This game was an idea that had been running around in my head for almost 2 years. The original vision was a multiplayer point and click adventure game with 6 characters and mini plots for each character all going at once. I wanted to try just one of the character's mini plots and see if I could get it to work. I particularly wanted to have a mystery that wasn't like a passive mystery in a book. That is, I wanted the player to feel like they had contributed to the solution to the mystery, rather than just being a passive observer.
What Went Right:
- I liked that it was sort of seamless in terms of reading through the story, that you weren't shown option a, b, or c. Since that made it feel more like reading a book.
- I liked the "moral" I attempted to put into the game in terms of what I defined as the "happy" ending.
What Went Wrong:
- Using Unity to implement this was a quick and dirty way to get something working. It felt like the interface really let down the entire game.
- People couldn't really see all the different endings. I think I had over 12 endings, but people couldn't understand where they had or hadn't gone right. This meant people weren't inclined to play again because they couldn't tell what they would do differently.
- Trying to have just a single sentence have the "important" information in it was hard. There were often sentences either side that seemed to have equally important things in it.
- The story would branch, not just for the endings, but players couldn't even see where the different branches happened. That's because it was so seamless.
- Players were forced to make decisions constantly, every line they read they had to make a decision about. It meant that there were so many apparent “choices” the player was probably overwhelmed and they ended up not seeing any branches at all.
Hug Rating:3 hugs
Verdict: The idea might work if it was deciding if an entire paragraph had “important” information or not. But I think ultimately unless the branching options were made more obvious to players (eg by telling the player explicitly, you didn’t notice A so now this is happening), players would feel like there weren’t doing anything.