Kevin Zhen: Final Reflection

PLAY TEST RESULTS:

My game was, as Elena predicted, too difficult. None who played was able to beat the game, although some came very close (solved three out of the four puzzles).

In fact, most who played merely glanced over the puzzles a few times and gave up in less than ten minutes.

An interesting discovery was that everyone found the Imp and Hydra to be easier than the Bible and Paper. When making the puzzles, I was certain that the Imp would be hardest to solve, but people found that Paper was the hardest.

In the end though, I'm glad I made the puzzles really tough, since it's easier to provide hints than go back and redesign the puzzles to make them harder.

Playtest Feedback

IMPROVEMENTS:

Because no one who played the game was able to solve it, I instituted a hint system in exchange for tries. Each hint costs 3 tries, so players are, at a maximum, only allowed three hints.

At Fernando's suggestion, I added music for the game, as well as sound effects that play during the GAME OVER and YOU WON passages.

Elena mentioned that Oscar's face was too big on one of the passages so I resized the image.

Lastly, because many had difficulty with the paper puzzle, I made a slight change to make it easier.

REFLECTIONS:

This was a really phenomenal class. Had I not taken it, I would never have had the opportunity to make my own video game. At the start of this course, I also truly believed it was beyond me to make a video game. Art and computer science are my biggest weaknesses and I constantly asked myself what I was doing taking this video game design course which relied on both of these skills. But through some hard work and perseverance, I was able to learn how to animate and become more familiar with video and sound editing.

Out of all the modeles, the Twine story map was the most helpful for me, mainly because it provided me all the necessary tools to design the game. If I had more time, I would learn Javascript so that I could introduce a timer function, which would help serve as a scoring system. I would give the player a base score of 1000, and for every minute that passes, the score would go down by 1. For every attempt that the reader has left after they beat the game, they also get 50 bonus points. If the timer runs out, the player loses, and the game is over.

I also enjoyed watching my peers create their own games. It was a cool process, and refreshing to know that everyone was a beginner (except maybe Julia - she has some rad art skills).

That's all! Thanks for a great term!