Alter Tales of Ubuntu

Design Concept:

• As established in Alter's Game Design - Post Mortem, with Alter Tales of Ubuntu, the idea was to grab the lessons we had learned with the previous project, and redesign the game with those key points in mind.

• The main changes I had decided with the team to implement were the following:

  • Decrease size of scope. Create a small, polished experience.

  • Focus completely on puzzle solving, so we don't have underused mechanics or spend development time in mechanics that are not fundamental to the game.

  • Decrease the number of characters from 3 to 2, so we could explore the relationship between them deeper, while also reducing the scope.

  • Get rid of 3D models, as it increases development time and efficieny greatly, and it is not the most important focus to the game.

  • Instead of having a lot of dialogue throughout the game, have small narrative breaks between puzzle solving. This will make the players more interested in reading as it's less text, and they can pause a bit from puzzle solving.

  • Not giving control to alter changing to the player. We create two dedicated levels for each character, with context clues given through those small narrative breaks.

  • No type of extra movement mechanic such as sprint and jumps. As the goal for this project is to focus in puzzle solving, these mechanics don't add anything valuable to the gameplay.

  • Change theme and characters to try a different spin on the story of the previous alter, giving more variety and difference between the two projects.

  • Use a single type of puzzle throughout the game, that can be iterated and modified, so there is a great usage of the puzzle, granting variety to the game while also increasing the difficulty through the experience so the player progressly learns and gets better at the puzzle solving.

What worked:

• The change of theme was a great idea. As I've lived in Mozambique for a small amount of time in my life, and one of my colleagues was from Angola, we decided that the theme should revolve around Africa. So I researched about the history of Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and created a fictional country called Ubuntu, who had ties with the rise and formation of these countries. I created a document with all of this information, which lead into a strong world building base to create our game.

• The change of theme with the decrease of characters to two, also worked really well. Our new characters Niyara and Haki were brothers who shared a body, and shape shifted along with their personality shift, due to mystical praises made by their parents to the Gods of Ubuntu. With the strong world building elements I had created, I also had a strong base to develop these two characters, their quirks, emotions and ways of being, and through the game, explore their experience.

• As we used a similar type of puzzle in both Haki's and Niyara's levels, the learning curve was very balanced, and the flow of the game was steady and smooth. Players knew how to engage with the players, even after the difficulty increase in Niyara's level.

  • How these puzzles worked were, there was a symbol numpad where the players needed to input the symbols in the right order to go to the next puzzle. In Haki's level there was a statue of the symbol always visible, accompanied with the order of the input. In Niyara's level the symbols were hidden in paintings. The player had to press a button that would reveal the symbol and its order for a couple of seconds. The memory exercise to pass this level was higher.

  • Also in each level, the difficulty increased in different ways. In Haki's level, each puzzle had a higher number of symbol inputs the more we progressed. In Niyara's level, not only the number of inputs increased, while also we could have two symbol numpads instead of one. This way the player needed to 'connect' that the colours of the paintings were connected to the colours of the numpads.

• Because we didn't have more mechanics than we needed, the players could focus solely in puzzle solving.

What didn't work:

• Even though we cutted a lot of mechanics, there were two that we wanted to keep but because of time constraints couldn't fully explore. We had an inventory where the player could see past dialogues, and items that they had grabbed earlier. The problem is because we didn't have time to invest in these mechanics they feel out of place in the game, and most people that play the game don't even know an inventory exists.

• There is only one moment where the player needs an item to open a door in the game, and is in the final part of Niyara's level. Because we never use this mechanic earlier in the game, some players are confused about what they need to do, and how to progress. To keep this mechanic, it should've been introduced much sooner in the game.

• There is a lot of world building and story that I wrote about the game, however because of time constraints we couldn't implement an effective way to transmit these story elements in a way that would make sense, and wouldn't negatively affect the game flow.

• In Niyara's level the idea of having two seperated symbol pads to increase difficulty didn't work as well as we wanted to. If the player actually tries to discover the order through the clues given by the game, the flow is the one we designed. However, because in some situations there are only two symbols needed in each symbol pad, the player can try to guess the code through trial and error, which is not what we anticipated.