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The game garbage day is super cool. Along with it being a great story game with a good story it has so many fun aspects that enhance the user experience. 

The sound and images really make the game go above and beyond. These features really suck you into the game and make you feel like you are in the person's shoes. The loud alarm clock startling you, the teeth brushing sound, the eggs sizzling are all examples of things that really enhance the story telling of the game. The radio choice then impacting the sound you hear is also super cool! The images do this as well. Instead of just imaging the story in your head there are images to reflect what's happening. Whether it be what you're eating, the houses you're driving by, etc. there are always pictures to support it..

The game begins as just the user being a garbage collector. The player talks about the daily tasks and you genuinely feel like you are just a person collecting garbage when playing the game. The designer also hints that the user likes finding things in the trash. This foreshadows the point of the game. The player finds a map in the trash that leads you to a dead body.

Another interesting thing that I liked about this game was the essence of time passing/progress you experience. The game does a great job to help you navigate through the game and really feel like you are making progress. It does this first by going through your morning in distinct steps. First your alarm, then your teeth brushing, then your breakfast, and more it all has a process. Then it comes to trash pickup. This explicitly makes you feel like making progress. Every time you go to a new house it tells you which one and how any more are left. This sense of progress also occurs at each house when picking up the trash. You go through every step of the trash pickup. Even if they are only one line each you must click through each task getting further and further down the page. This makes you feel as you are progressing through the tasks. The time flashing in the top corner of the screen after time has passed also helps with this. After every long amount of time that passes a time flashes in the top left corner. This also really helps with the feeling of time passing throughout the game. The aspect of digging and digging and clicking through those actions also does this job. This is a super important aspect to this gameplay. 

Overall I thought this game was super clever. It accurately depicts the actions and day of a garbage collector but then ends with a spooky twist. I really love how the story starts by stating that the player looks through trash and that a person's trash is telling of them and ends the story with the same concept. When you first hear this it is innocent and you don't think much of it, but in the end you see its spooky other meaning. That your trash can incriminate you.

This game was honestly such an amazing concept! I loved this new take on a sokoban game. This game takes a traditional sokoban concept of moving blocks and adds a really great unique spin to it.

The game is basically sokoban but with words. The user starts with simple examples and those examples grow on each other eventually even making words into new things. But basically the area starts with letters jumbled and out of order. The goal of the game is to take these letters and make them into words. When you make the words a cool effect occurs and the words disappear. 

The gameplay is super awesome. The user's goal is to create words with the letters given but it is honestly much more than that. The satisfaction the user gets when they complete the world is awesome. Whether it be just a noise or an explosion that lasts multiple frames. It makes the entire process super satisfying. The designer really put thought into how the player feels when playing the game. There is noise when you move as well making you feel more sucked into the game. 

The blurbs in the beginning of each level really guide the gameplay. Although there aren’t specific instructions to the games the blurbs of text in between levels do help the user navigate controls in the game. These blurbs are just the user talking to the player but not even explicitly giving directions. You don’t even really know its a sokoban like game. This is all assumed. You learn early that the arrows allow you to move and the first word “HELLO” with just one letter out of place implies that you must move it into place. After your success the blurbs then say hi. And then say something welcoming you into the world. This “welcome to the world” quote allows you to then navigate the jumbled words on the screen to make these words. You then use the leftover letters to make other words. So even if the blurbs don’t give explicit directions they guide the user on what they are supposed to do through the game. This is really clever. 

From how I have described the game it seems like there aren't any obstacles. There are definitely obstacles in this game. There are two main movement obstacles. The first is when you hit a wall. When you hit a wall on any of the sides there is no moving that block off that wall. Because it is a sokoban game, your movement is only allowed to push blocks. This gets frustrating and forces you to be strategic about your moves. Another sokoban obstacle is moving more than one block at once. You are not allowed to do this which gets very frustrating. So if you by accident have 4 blocks making a square you can’t move any of them because there will always be a box next to it. This is another hurdle you have to navigate when moving letters. You have to be careful what you move and where you move it to ensure you can move after.

Overall this game was super creative. I love the new take on the sokoban game. It was super fun navigating the game and playing it!

The game stacking is honestly a very interesting concept I have never seen before. The game is super interesting! In the beginning I did not understand how to play the game. This was frustrating. But as I tried random controls I was able to figure out the game. 

The game works as the player being a small magenta square with a tiny pink square inside. You do not know this explicitly. Blocks begin to fall from the top of the screen. These boxes are random colors and in random places horizontally. Some fall to the bottom of the screen while others fall a little above it. They are randomly dispersed horizontally though. Your tiny box navigates the game by trying to jump on the boxes and travel upwards. You use the A, D, W keys to go left right and jump. This also wasn’t explicitly stated. I am pretty sure the goal of the game is to make it to the top but I never was able to reach this point. I made it far up but never to the top. Another thing the player must consider is a box hitting them. A player cannot have a box fall on their box. There is a score at the top as well. I am still a little unsure of what that keeps track of. Does it keep a score of how many times you get to the top? I made it pretty far up and it never kept score of that so I am assuming that is what it means.

Other than the confusion I think this game is a super cool concept. Playing a game to climb stacking boxes without them falling on you sounds like a super fun interesting concept. I also loved how colorful and exciting the game was. It has great potential to be a game in the future. 

This game is fun but incredibly  frustrating. This is due to the randomness of the game. Because the blocks of the game fall randomly at any point on the screen it makes it super difficult to do well. In the beginning, some of the blocks don’t even hit the bottom of the screen. Because of this, your box can’t even reach the boxes, even by jumping. This makes it hard to start the game. If the user can’t reach the boxes they have to wait for another box to push it further. This only happens sometimes but because the height is random that is frustrating. The other frustrating part is the horizontal location of boxes. Sometimes you will have traveled high enough but a box is coming to land on your box horizontally. I understand this is a challenge of the game but sometimes there is nowhere to go on the screen. This makes you fall to the bottom. And once you are at the bottom it is nearly impossible to climb back up because of the amount of boxes on top of you. 

To improve this game there are a few things I would do. Although randomness is a major part of the game I would probably reduce the amount of it. Because everything is random, the random outcomes often make the game very difficult to play. Having restrictions on height of blocks or horizontal location relative to previous blocks would be great. Another change I would make would be to add instructions to the game. The lack of instructions makes the game super hard to learn how to play. It should be explicit which keys are the control and which thing the player is controlling on the screen. I would also find it useful to have a restart button. 

Prompt 3:

The idea of time and space was super interesting in this game. Each room was a completely different scene with a unique colors and landscape. All the rooms had unique ways to guide you through the rooms to find the exits. Some rooms for example had the tiles lead a path for the user to talk. This path would not let you walk outside it and guide you through the scene leading to the exit. Other scenes had the user interact with another character/sprite. These scenes would have some kind of explanation on the scene itself and where the exit would be. Lastly there would be other times where you legit could only move in one direction to exit the room to another. The creator of the game decided to restrict movement so the user would find the exit because it was the only way they could move. The various themes, colors and obstacles in each room added a sense of confusion and randomness. For me it also made me feel as I went through the game that I was making progress toward the end goal. 

All these ways the creator allowed movement, especially between scenes, was super creative. It gave the sense of randomness to the user that the creator wanted to portray. The point of the game from my understanding was to have the user kind of walk around senselessly, working hard to work for an end goal that didn’t exist. The complicated ways of finding rooms, random assortment of scenes, and limited movement helped with this mission. When the user finds out all the progress they have achieved and how far they have gone means nothing,  because of the room styles, they are able to feel frustrated and understand the creators message more.

The colors in this game totally accurately predict the idea/theme the game is giving off. The game is called Moon and the coloring makes you feel as though you were in the sky and in space.They do this by using the bright yellow stars in contrast with the black dark background. When anyone looks at the sky you would expect yellow stars and black sky which is what the user did. The user also made the moon white which made sense! The yellow stars are used to kind of lead the user to where they are meant to go. The coloring makes this especially obvious because of the amount of contrast. The user being white as well also makes sense with the scheme. Not only is it aesthetic but it also largely contrasts the other colors of yellow and black. 

As you continue through the game, the color scheme changes. I thought this was a completely interesting choice. The colors change to a grey/white background with green stars and a red user. Although I’m not sure, the color scheme of this made me as a user of the game feel nervous. Red and green are contrasting colors which was an interesting choice, the bright red was stressing me out. The green items were still the obstacles but the user and moons were red. This made me frustrated because the coloring was highlighting an object I did not have access to. I think this was the creators intention.