Posted February 14, 2020 by Kez
#Mystery #2D #Singleplayer #Puzzle #First-Person #Atmospheric #Story Rich #Dev Log
Last week I dove back into The Arcadia Report with a fresh perspective after some time off and published the first dev log, reflecting on a project at a turning point. The conclusion? This location-hopping mystery game had many of the right parts but maybe not put together in the right order. So continuing on with the plan to design in the open, kicked off in the last post, here’s how I went about reimagining and streamlining a murder mystery experience (without committing any actual murders).
My aim for this week sounded straightforward enough: simplify the core experience and identify MVP ready design. Except that ‘core experience’ was more or less the entire game I had been working on for the last 3+ months. And I wanted to overhaul it in less than 7 days.
I realise I may be overestimating how much can be crammed into a week but sure, that’s what makes it interesting. As mentioned last week, I’m coopting the 5 day design sprint process to help me focus (and ideally achieve) one key aim each week. In this case, the goal was purposely lofty for such a compressed timeframe to force me to get creative and not rely on what is already there. That way at the very worst, all I’ve lost is a week and gained a knowledge along the way. So on with the sprint!
Spoiler: probably a lot.
Kicked off the sprint with a bit of musing on long term goals and potential pitfalls/ways everything could go horribly, horribly wrong along the way (spoiler: there’s always more than you think. But it’s actually great to get them out there). These formed the basis for some of the key questions this sprint would focus on:
Rather than going back to the old flows and customer journey maps I had outlined, for the purpose of this redesign experiment I zoomed in on the onboarding/first encounter with Arcadia and noted down a high level overview of what that might involve (along with a lot of notes to myself and probably jumping towards potential solution ideas too quickly but at this point I was getting carried away).
Armed with the a load of questions and many potential problems, I narrowed down to what I would focus on this week for the purpose of this redesign. To tackle (and hopefully answer) some of the questions/ways this could go wrong, I decided to hone in on one audience — gamers — and simplifying the core experience. The goal being simplification and streamlining the experience, I decided to focus on your first introduction to the world of Arcadia so I could see how far I could go in terms of stripping back to the essentials.
Now to forget everything. Well, not quite.
This isn’t so about throwing out everything from before, but looking at it in a new light now that I had a much better grasp on the composite ideas. I went back to my original research, referencing ‘analysis’ (aka justifying spending hours playing games by calling it research) I had completed before Christmas on everything from the amazing Her Story to the classic Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and consolidated the highlights.
Head now abuzz with problems to solve and mystery goodness, it was time for storyboarding.
Maybe a bit too abuzz because even my drawing skills certainly took a nose dive the further along the storyboard went. But hey, what counts is just communicating the concepts for now and putting things in perspective of how people might actually play the game. That’s when I could really start to let loose and go back to basics. From pretending I was starting from scratch and sketching as 8 (+/-) ideas in 8 minutes to twisting the existing experience on its head to find the epicentre.
By the end, the introduction to The Arcadia Report went from something like this:
To this:
It packs the same content but streamlined and simplified, refocused around the location scanner and getting you into straight into the mystery (rather than the interface). There are still areas missing and the prototype is broad brushstrokes for now. However, in a single week this covered the essential steps and question of introducing the core of the experience — following clues to real locations to unlock evidence — and flipped The Arcadia Report on its head. For the better, if you ask me, but next to find out what players think.
The moment of truth. The Arcadia Report has a fresh UX overhaul but there are still parts to be worked out for this update. Along the way, it’ll mean diving back into the mystery and fleshing out the clues with a fresh perspective. But before that, I want to get the new designs in front of players and get their response and thoughts to see if The Arcadia Report is heading in the right direction or not. Only one way to find out.
Until next time, stay safe.