dev.log Violet — Designing and testing

Yiru Chung
Nov 1 · 2 min read

I loved the design challenges we did last week! I realized I completely forgot about those little paper challenges at restaurants, but I remember enjoying them! It was interesting trying to think of a completely different game though, I was so used to crossover puzzles and word searches for this format of games. One concept I wanted to try was wordplay, so I ended up pulling ideas from Baba is You, a puzzle game where you push around words to create different contexts for sentences. The game involved moving around. I needed a different way to incorporate that, so my partner suggested doing a maze.

My sketch for the paper based game
My sketch for the paper based game

The basic idea is that kids would follow the maze at the top to create and fill in a short sentence of their own choice. Then, they would use the crayons to draw the sentences they created. To be honest, it’s a lot of steps and I wonder if it would’ve been too much for a kid or if maybe the process could be refined.

Coming up with the idea was definitely fun, but I can already tell it needs playtesting before I would actually put it out to be seen. I got really shy when it came to presenting the ideas because I knew it wasn’t finished. In truth, I’m nowhere near as shy as I was in the past, but it’s still a part of me, frustratingly enough.

Take five of your favorite games and plot them on the play matrix. Describe what pattern you see. What does this tell you about yourself?

  1. Octopath Traveler — Mental/Skill, with a little bit of chance
  2. Okami — Physical/ Skill, with a bit of mental
  3. Ace Attorney — Solid Mental. It’s on rails, so there’s no real skill/chance
  4. Monster Hunter — Physical/ Skill, with a bit of mental
  5. Bastion — Physical/Skill, with a bit of mental

…Well to start, this tells me I really, really like Capcom games. And another thing, I tend to stray away from any games that involve a lot of chance. To be fair, I actually play many more RPGs than I listed here, but even then, those only involve a slight amount of chance in most of the battles. I really enjoy being in control of my own actions, figuring out what the problem is, and tackling it from there. I love puzzles, and I think when there’s a game that involves physical coordination and skill, I try to figure that system out like it’s a puzzle. Chance has a tendency to frustrate me because I feel like too many things are out of my control and I’m not making progress. So it makes sense that I would only enjoy chance if I had more sense of control or skill, like how I would build my characters in an RPG.

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