Office Nightmare
This game is a turn-based bullet hell where players manage limited card pickups in an increasingly difficult bullet hell. The player's goal in the game is to gain as much score as possible, both through rapid completion of turns and through surviving as long as possible. Our intended player experience is that of Fiero, meaning to feel pleasure or satisfaction at one's achievements, and we achieve it through the patterns below. Further detail is found within the documentation in this project's files.
Core Patterns:
These patterns were used for our game design process, and were implemented in the final game.
Design Problem:
How to give variety to the ways that players can solve a puzzle, overcome a challenge, and reach game goals? How to let players choose their own strategy while making their choices meaningful?
Design Description:
When players understand the main gameplay loop, now it’s time to introduce a variety of challenges and add to the gameplay difficulty. But this variety should also reflect different approaches that players can choose to solve the problems and strategize their actions so that they can achieve the best results. To do so, designers can provide players with different tools, power-ups, and interactable objects, which can aid players ability to overcome challenges offensively, defensively, evasively etc. However, using different strategies should be meaningful to the players; otherwise they end up not understanding their importance in solving problems. Also it might make players choose only one method to overcome challenges and ignore the rest, which is not desirable.
Design Problem:
How do designers create difficulty that can lead to Fiero.
Design Description:
One way to achieve Fiero is through high complexity choices with many opportunities to fail. The choices all have to be impactful, which happens when the difference between winning and losing is very small, i.e. each game state on the path to a win is never more than a few decisions away from a losing game state.
Design Problem:
While simple static spaces are useful to introduce players to basic movement and the fundamental mechanics of a game, they can become too easy to read, navigate, and understand as player skills advance throughout a game. Designers need to find a way to keep players engaged with the environment.
Design Description:
To create a dynamic and engaging playspace, a designer should consider that the playspace is not just defined by the static architecture of a level but by the space that a player can access at any given time. By employing various techniques to limit and alter that space, a designer can turn the simple traversal of a level into a spatial puzzle.
The pattern of Temporally Available Move Space has several applications. The simplest and most obvious example would be a moving platform, space that is only accessible to a player some of the time.
The temporally available move space has different functionalities. For a moving platform, players have to jump on it within a regular timing period, which increases the difficulty and practices players' skills. For a moving guard with a limited view, a rock that blocks the view is an ideal hidden place for players to avoid detection and allows players to guide their movement path accordingly. Also, as these spaces are temporally available to players, the shift changes players' perception of space, making the gameplay more compelling. Also, there is temporally unavailable move space, which is the opposite side of temporally available move space, like space in front of a moving bullet. It has the same effect to limit players' move space and express useful information.
Design Problem:
Players can begin to feel too comfortable with a certain style of play, leading to them feeling bored and missing out on aspects of gameplay.
Design Description:
To keep players from feeling comfortable, designers can make the consequences for mistakes strong and immediate, throwing them into new and dangerous situations that require players to improvise.
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