Reflection #4

I decided to revisit my game Starch at the End for the final design challenge. As a digital game, there were still a few bugs and difficult things to work around like removing page breaks so an extra dialogue box won’t appear, and moving browsers entirely since the program has more trouble running on Google Chrome than Firefox or Microsoft Edge. I noticed the speed of player movement suffered while in Chrome compared to Microsoft Edge, so I made the switch halfway through for smoother playtesting.

I had some family members and friends playtest for me while I was adding new things, and it made me realize how much more exploration I wanted in the game. As fun as it was to grab water for the flowers and do some other small tasks, the scenery and interesting places were another big factor for player experience since there wasn’t anything like combat or majorly complex puzzles. Bitsy is a great tool, but still limited to a certain degree, so I tried to make the best out of the program by creating a lot of different tiles and art that would add to the experience. Even before playtesting, I noticed my friends would be excited to explore certain places as they saw me working to create them, so I think I was successful in that area.

Not much explanation was needed to figure out where to go and how to progress the game, though some playtesters wanted a dialogue option that warns them of whether or not a certain action would take them to an ending of the game or not.

I did consider that while making the different endings to the game, but it’s short enough that players can go through it multiple times without feeling bored. It also was not possible to add that feature anyway given Bitsy’s limitations, but if I had worked in another program where it was possible, I definitely would have added some sort of warning. I still plan on making changes to the game when I have some free time and I enjoyed working on it from beginning to end. If I could have done more before submitting the game, I definitely would have fleshed out the mermaid’s ancient water mechanic and would have made actual interactable houses for the village area. I still have a list of multiple other endings I wanted to include, but the scope of my idea may not work for Bitsy without some additional add-ons I’ve seen floating around the internet.