At a cafe with your best friend — Postmortem

This a postmortem on the game “At a cafe with your bestfriend” (AACWYBF). AACWYBF was inspired by the theme of being in a comfortable and relaxed state while enjoying the company of your best friend at your favorite cafe, Squeezels. We were given a time span of 4 weeks to start and finish the game in order for a showcase at the end.
Before I delve any further into the process and details that went into making this game, I want to highlight the importance of teamwork, pipelines and motivation. I was very fortunate to work alongside peers and classmates who brought a level of maturity and capability throughout the project. Without their exceptional dedication and hard work, AACWYBF wouldn’t be were it is now. We kept ourselves updated almost daily and updated our documentation rigorously when changes and additions were made, these updates allowed us to stay focused and design accordingly.
This began this project with a very strong start. Myself and another designer immediately got to work on concepting, iterating and scoping out appropriate documentation such as Art bibles, GDDs, interactions and conversation docs. We worked hard together to pitch ideas, solidify core elements and create a list of desirables for future collaborators to fulfill. Its vital to knock out these documents early in order to design with a clear understanding of what we want to implement.
After documentation was complete, we settled on the concept of creating a small intimate space that is intended to replicate the feeling of comfort one gets when relaxing at home, as per the brief requirement. We chose to create this space inside a cafe that would seat the player next to one of their best friends. That way, it would limit the level of uncomfortably the player may feel when jumping into an unfamiliar scene.
In order to create this space, I went out and scouted out local cafes and restaurants in order to gather interior layout ideas and decor placements. After multiple inspections, began to recognize some familiarity between each store, such as exposed beams on the roof, a plethora succulents and plants, modern artworks and jazz music. Using this information, I began work on creating our cafe in Unity using basic 3d objects as placeholders in order to create the feel of being at a real cafe.
AACWYBF is text heavy and relies a lot on the layout and art style in order to retain player attention. We used Fungus, an amazing Unity plugin that utilizes visual scripting in order for designers to create story driven games. Fungus allowed us to implement the 30+ unique conversation topics with ease and without much hassle. We were very fortunate to have two game artists jump on board and create visually pleasing sprites that really give the game a unique feel.
We had our first play test shortly after creating the cafe layout and incorporating the topics into Fungus. The play test was a success and we had a good turnout that yielded some very important feedback. Players enjoyed the art style and the layout but felt that the conversations between them and their best friend wasn't very “organic”, which is a problem considering are core theme is to make the player feel comfortable with their best friend. In order to fix this, we went through our conversation list and gave the player and best friends dialogue more of a personality and identity.
We gave the player a more timid but caring feel while giving the best friend a more headstrong and looser feel to her responses. Giving the player a role to play proved to be more immersive and rewarding for the player because it allowed project themselves into it rather than having to force themselves into believing that they are friends with this foreign NPC.
Once we had multiple collaborators from different disciplines, we needed to use multiple platforms in order to keep them updated and allow them to converse with us easily without having to meet up in person. We used Hack-n-Plan, Slack, Messenger and google apps conversation messenger in order to keep up with communications. Although it would of been a lot smoother to use 1 platform or chat room for conversing, Its important to understand that not everyone has the time or capabilities to learn and understand foreign tools, so it’s up to us designers to compensate for this and find a middle ground.
The project was now functionally complete and looking pretty, we showcased the game and it was a hit! I had many people sit down a smile at the conversations, puns and intractables. Although, I noticed that people were much more interested vigorously clicking on everything in order to find something to interact with rather than enjoying the conversations.
The goal was to have the player be comfortable and enjoy the scene, but all people seems interested in is clicking around admiring the intractables. I suppose that when we made a game with 2 major mechanics (Story board and clickable) that one would be more appealing to the other, but I would’ve be more appeased if players were more interested in the story considering the amount of effort and time that was spent creating it. But I’m still overly pleased with the final product.
As far as delivery goes, I suppose I could have been more “demanding” of deadlines for the collaborators considering we were given the assets close to showcasing. We set up the timetable to allow the collaborators more than enough time to deliver, but this only seemed to give them a false sense of blithe. I suppose you can only plan and organize so much that it in the end, it all falls on the collabortators to actually put in the time and effort. But in the end we got most of what we needed and the showcase went well regardless.
I’m very please with how this project went from beginning to end and it has restored my faith in group projects. I worked along side an amazingly skilled and highly passionate designer who made this project a reality. If i could take one thing away from this project is that it’s vital to work alongside your group in order to reduce stress and confusion and create a game that everyone an be proud to have worked on.
