New Minigames, more feedback

Last week I went to a playtesting event in Brooklyn and got a lot of super constructive and detailed feedback. I especially enjoyed watching people play the demo in person, something I hadn't seen since making my last round of revisions. Folks were generally encouraging, and a couple of people gave me some much-needed "tough love" about some design decisions I was holding onto. Overall I'm so grateful for everyone taking the time to play the demo and give me their insights, and hearing all of this has been very encouraging to keep going!

One of the first things that I noticed in this playthrough is that folks still needed more explicit instructions for the opening minigames. They understood better what they were meant to do in terms of input, but needed more instruction on what that input was doing to progress the minigame. This was especially true in the opening diaper change minigame. Though the substitution of "mash" improved people's understanding, some folks said, "I'm not sure exactly what this is doing." This echoes some of the feedback I got from the virtual round of feedback, and I can see that title slides only go so far and that instructions like "mash arrow keys to pull diaper flaps" will give players a very solid understanding of what they're meant to do, and what to look for in terms of "success."

With that in mind, I've been working on the next set of minigames: putting on baby's sock, cleaning off baby's highchair, and plunging baby's nose. As I'm putting together this next round of minigames, I'm trying to experiment with design ideas that will be easily "portable" to another input system that's not keyboard and mouse. For instance, I'm trying to be mindful of the ways the mouse will be used in cleaning baby's highchair and how I can map that to a twin-stick controller. But for now, I'm focusing on game feel to have more balance between keyboard and mouse inputs and preventing clumsy interactions (switching from one to another seamlessly/with little friction). In the short term, I've been focusing on the above plunging minigame.

You might notice in the above clip I've updated the stress interface to be a bit more visible and also to share the hand-drawn aesthetic of the rest of the game. It felt time to bring that into the build since I felt like it stood out and wasn't grabbing attention in the way I had originally envisioned/designed it. I also have implemented a more robust system for "onboarding" the player by starting them out with very limited stress tolerance that will then get triggered pretty early in the game-loop in order to properly introduce the "Breaking Point" mechanic that I've been working on but has yet to be incorporated into the central loop.

This leads me to say that I did some small redesigns to the previous minigames in that each game "ends" if the player gets "Stressed Out" (i.e., fills up one of their stress tolerance meters). I found that when people played the demo there wasn't really any incentive to have players race against the "stress clock." All of that racing was either 1) self-imposed or 2) arbitrary. So now I made these a bit more "consequential" which I think helps reinforce the core loop intention of preventing stress from getting in the way of doing as much as you can during the day. Now this feels a bit tighter and one-to-one.

There's some other little tiny bits of clean up that I've done to improve playability (and legibility) as well, but I won't go into those minor details since I want to avoid having these updates read like release notes. But one of the smaller, and perhaps invisible to the player, pieces of development work that I've been doing is revisitng some the "communications" side of the game (and Essay Games as a studio) by working with someone on a communications document that will help solidify the outward message I want the game to have. Crafting this language will not only shore up what's important to me as as designer, but also help shape the language I'll use around the game at events and pitch meetings going forward. It's been a really revealing process and I'm excited to share a bit more of that side with folks soon.

With this in mind, I want to start building out my mailing list so that I can deliver more pointed missives about the development of the game, and announce important milestones and events I'll be attending in a more direct way. So please take a moment and subscribe!

Otherwise, looking forward to sharing more development details soon!