Understudied: CS247G Final Project
Intention for the Game
In Understudied, you‘re an understudy for a play. Instead of rehearsing you have been taking it easy. Suddenly, the director calls upon you to replace a lead role but you never even looked at the script! Use your sense of rhythm and quick decision making to survive the final performance!
I wanted to target this game towards people who enjoy rhythm games and casual games with comical and lighthearted narratives. I drew major inspiration from Rhythm Heaven from Nintendo and The Henry Stickmin Collection from PuffballsUnited:
- Both games involve simple mechanics and multiple choice decision making to pass a sequence of obstacles
- Both games feature a charming, cartoonish art style
- Both games emphasize making both player successes AND player failures fun
For types of fun, I wanted there to be “challenge” fun in terms of keeping up with an unknown script on the fly. In this game, the challenge would be to match the other NPC actors in the scene in terms of rhythm and acting choices.
In addition, I wanted there to be “sensation” fun. To this end, I wanted the music to be enjoyable to listen and play along with and the animations to be entertaining in a cartoonish and carefree manner.
Lastly I wanted there to be “fantasy” fun, that is I want the player to feel for a moment as if they are an imposter in a big performance trying to “act” their way through it. This is closely related to the narrative, but I would say its more “fantasy” than “narrative” fun. That is, the focus is more so on using the story to describe a setting that would be fun to roleplay in (fantasy) as opposed to creating a story that might be compelling on its own (although there could be elements of both).
Values
- The core loop of the game is reacting to prompts with the correct choices in the correct rhythm.
- The correct responses to prompts should be able to be figured out within a few seconds of receiving the prompt itself. That is the player should be rewarded for correct reactions as opposed to planning or information gathering. (TLDR, levels should be possible to beat on the first try)
- Emphasis should be put on making the minimum requirements to progress unrestrictive enough that players can focus on “sensation” and “fantasy” fun if they choose to.
- Related to the above, for players that focus on “challenge” fun, optional challenges should be presented in each level. (Not implemented in demo below)
- Emphasis should be put on making failures entertaining
- Artwork will be aimed at creating a simplistic, cartoonish, and light hearted atmosphere, like a comic strip.
Some Formal Elements
- Player — This is a singleplayer game
- Objectives — The main objective is to pass a series of levels that challenges the players rhythm and decision making.
- Procedures — Every level features different audio, verbal, and visual prompts that the player must respond to accurately enough to progress. The player responds by pressing the right keys at the right time on the keyboard.
- Outcomes — Every level is either passed or failed. The player must play the level until they pass to progress to the next level. If the player passes, different levels of feedback are given based on performance (perfect, really good, so-so, etc).
- Rules — During each level, players have a set of actions that they can take in the play (say a line, show an emotion, dance moves, etc). At any point during the level, the player can take one of these actions. The player is penalized for not taking the right actions at the right times (i.e. figuring out and following the script).
- Conflicts — The main conflict is to survive each part of the performance, like an obstacle course. If the player makes mistakes in the performance, the other actors (and in an update the director and audience) will be shocked and appalled!
Concept map
Main Iterations and Playtesting
For the class, I am presenting a small slice of the game, playable as a demo. This level features a dialogue prompt where the player must respond “aye” or “nay” at the correct points in the dialogue. For the full game, I plan to have at least five more levels using the structure presented in the concept map. The five levels are planned based on singing, dancing, emoting, and sword fighting prompts, with the final level being a mixture of the previous. I also plan to extend the game to new areas, for instance, after the understudy play setting the player could move on to fitting in with no preparation on a sports team (or many other settings) using the same core loop.
1. Previous scrapped ideas
This game idea had a very late start (I started working on this idea 8 days ago). The project idea before that also started a few weeks behind schedule but after iterating on it for 2 weeks, I decided to scrap it and start this one. Although less glamorous, I believe that starting an idea, gathering information, and then realizing that I wanted to pivot away from it is also a valuable part of development and had I not gone through that step, I wouldn’t have arrived at this game.
Positive Outcome: Pivoted from a game idea that didn’t appear to be working and put my energy into a new game idea that had more promise.
2. Personal Testing, Rugged Animations Synced to Music
The first version of the game featured animated characters that were designed to move in sync to music. I wanted to test the rhythm aspect of the game. The animations all looked fine until I added in music. After some troubleshooting, I realized that the animations and music were out of sync by about 200ms which made the game feel completely out of rhythm. My solution was to always start animations on the beginning of a measure based on the timestamp from the audio track. Although a small detail, this mechanic forms a major foundation of the game and it took a surprising amount of time to get it to consistently feel right.
Positive Outcome: Improved animations and related scripts so that they were always in sync with the music.
3. Friend Playtest, First Playable Version with music
My first playtest was a success and a failure. Basically a music track played and the player could control the moves of the character. The idea was that the player was supposed to match the movements of the NPC characters in sync to the music and there was visual feedback for when the player was out of rhythm. In terms of success, the game successfully ported to Windows, the music played, and everything was in sync. The bad news was that my friend didn’t have much of a sense of what they were supposed to do or how to respond to prompts although they seemed to enjoy the animations.
Positive Outcome: This was mostly a litmus test to make sure that the game could be interacted with, that the rhythm was intuitive to someone else, and that the controls were usable. That said, it became clear to me that the game needed to give more obvious prompts to the player.
4. Class TA Playtest, Core Features Version
This playtest featured a playable level, with newly added dialogue prompts to the player in the form of questions, and the player had to respond correctly with “aye” or “nay” in rhythm with the music. I also added a small tutorial to help onboard the player on how responding to a prompt would work.
Positive Outcome: On this playtest, I got a lot of concrete feedback on how to improve the game. First, the queues for when the player was supposed to answer were not intuitive so I added in sound queues to help the player find the rhythm more easily. Further, the tutorial used a different counting structure from the subsequent level so I made them the same. Also, I found out that the aspect ratio on some computers cropped the game so I fixed that. Overall, my main takeaway was to give the player more feedback on how well they were doing and more structured audio and visual queues for what to do.
5. Final Playtest, Current Version
This version added several new narrative, tutorial, and cosmetic features including
- A rennovated tutorial, the new version a) ensures the player could complete at least two prompts before starting the main level, b) tells the player why they failed a prompt (late, early, wrong answer, etc), c) gives a better description of what to expect during the level, and d) varies the information and number of exercises given based on player performance
- An introductory animation and dialogue “cutscene” to set up the story
- A cowbell audio queue before every “aye” or “nay” prompt in both the tutorial and main level. I also, remixed the audio track to be less loud and harsh, allowing the audio queue to cut more clearly through the music.
- A pirate themed 2D background and costumes for the NPC characters
- New facial animations to give the player easier to see (and hopefully more entertaining) feedback on their performance
- A score screen which showed players how many mistakes they made, their overall performance, and the director’s feedback to wrap up the short story component.
Final Playtest Video
Downloadable Version
Please keep in mind this is just a small demo!
Mac OS Version
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18Zg3XnCBth42s_nCMZc_WnOLt6UY2Rns/view?usp=sharing
Windows Version
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mj-3id9Fe7DN70TngJT1SN8SEmMDdfA2/view?usp=sharing
Conclusion
I had a great time working on this project and will continue to develop it over the holidays! I also really enjoyed taking this class and hope to continue working on games in the future!
