Development devlog

Overall process

This project is an exploration of recreating social conflicts in the form of a strategy-simulation game. The final product, Tama Tama Paradise, is a reversed metaphor, sugar coated dark parable about social media.

Meta-game wise, players' role represents influencers and operators of a social media platform. Tamas living in a petri dish is the abstract depiction of individuals using a social media product. Users produce valuable contents (Light Manna) to support others with the same side. Also, they send toxic contents (Dark Manna) to people they disagree with, wanting to eliminate those users. The surplus Manna, not taken in by a Tama, becomes the player's assets. A new user is open to information from both sides, just like a newborn neutral Tama can eat Light Manna from both subtypes. But as they keep receiving influences from both sides, they will turn into a member of the side who feeds it with relatively more contents (Light Manna).

The works can be divided into three parts: Tama's behaviour simulation, the flow of the game and artworks. My collaborator, Junxian Liu, created the simulation system that controls how Tamas behave: spawning Tamas, changing Tamas' colour, handling attack, heal and death. I made the rest of the gameplay, including the contents, the level and resource systems, player's actions and interactions.

Design docs, development images, notes

Numerics and writings

Playtesting feedback

The cheering fact is that my players can get the game's message without extra explanation. They reported that they can clearly see the connection between the contents and the referred social issue.

Problems reported by the test takers are concentrated around the difficulty and the UI usability:

Difficulty

• The most fatal problem is that it is nearly impossible to beat the game because the solution is not transparent, and the numerics are not tuned to balanced.

UI usability

• The gameplay relies much on interacting with the UI, but UI transition and motion effects are not sufficient: sometimes a panel pops up too abruptly that it startles the player.
• There are visual elements (such as the binder clip image on the experiment manual) that don't serve a purpose. They are usually leftovers from the previous iteration. Players tried to interact with it but only find it not responding.
• Problem with paying for one config card multiple times: there is no effective solution to stop players purchase and apply the config card that they are currently using. That has caused a waste of player's resource.
• The UI panels don't block raycasting: the game objects are scaled when panels are open.