Creativity Cards Assessment
The Creativity Cards assessment started on the 2nd of November and finished on the 26th of November with a review session. This assessment started by putting us into teams, and then giving us 2 cards with random themes and genres. The cards we pulled were âPuppetâ and âNoirâ. We found this difficult to work with, as we were not sure whether to use âPuppetâ as an aesthetic and give the player models puppet strings, or make it something deeper, like a character being used as a puppet. My team consisted of myself, Susie, Troy, Lizzi, Hallam, Fabian, Danny, Ricard and Jacob.Â
(Edit: From the start, âPuppet Noirâ was doomed. Every morning in the scrum meeting, something new would be proposed for the game and no one really knew what the game was going to be. Again it was too big of a project for 2 weeks, and too big of a project for our developers who did not work well together. We all tried our best however, and our game had a lot of scope and interesting ideas, if we had more time it could have been a very interesting game.)Â
We decided that we wanted the game to be a detective style game set in a motel, where the player controlled a gum-shoe type officer, a few days from retirement and tired of the work heâd been doing for years. We wanted the players to solve puzzles around each room, and be able to talk to characters each with unique dialogue trees. We also wanted the player to choose a character they thought committed the murder at the end of the game and get a different ending depending on whether they picked the right person or wrong person. We wanted the cut scenes to be graphic novel type cutscenes with small animated parts, similar to the âI am Legendâ comic shorts, with static images and animated facial expressions or basic movement.Â
The first room was white boxed very quickly, and everyone started to work on something, but nothing was implemented into the game right until the deadline. Progress was also slow, as most people left their work right until the last minute. At the start I wrote a the murder details and sequence of events, the character names, the opening monologue and the letter that was used in one room as a clue to a puzzle. These are found below:
The work I did in sprint 1 took a while to complete, as our work pipeline between me and the designers came to a stop, as I was told to wait for the designers to finish the murder sequence/details before I wrote the story, but then the designers wanted me to write the story before I knew the details. Once I finished the details, they then told me that they werenât good enough and needed to include more murder weapons to make more puzzles easier. This proved difficult, as noir tends not to be brutally violent, and romanticises and glamorises murders instead of being gory or grotesque. I managed to finally solve this by sitting the entire team down and talking them through the details of the murder and making sure everyone knew what the game was and who the characters were.Â
With the sprint 1 review, we were told that we needed to pick up and do the work that wasnât being done because of poor attendance, and that we needed to limit the scope of the game more, with Rich telling us that the ideas sounded great but he did not believe we could do what we want in the short time we had. We were also told to get as many assets in the game as quick as we can, instead of leaving it until the last minute.Â
In sprint 2, we started to try and take on other peoples work to get more stuff done, as suggested by Rich. I started this sprint by drawing up a plan of what characters would reveal what information in their dialogue trees and what they would talk like, for example their colloquialism and their personality. We also narrowed the circumstances of the murder down even further, and I decided to go with a classic noire trope, and have the murder kill the victim because her husband was sleeping with him.
As you can see below, I manage to get the team to narrow down to 3 characters, 2 characters to throw the players off and 1 that was the actual murderer. I decided that the male character, Monty Ward, would be timid and intelligent, who the murderer is trying to frame. The other characters are Stella Blanche, who acts suspicious, and has a vendetta against the victim and the murderer herself Lilith Marcellus, who like classic noire movies is suspicious from the start and gives subtle hints to try and throw the players off and to shift the blame to the other characters. I wrote the characters to have a sort of dynamic together, and that they all disliked and were involved with each other in some way. For example, Stella was planning on stealing from Montyâs safe, Monty disliked Lilith for her rudeness towards him, Lilith disliked Stella because Stella knew the victim, Nina, was sleeping with her husband.
I then wrote a diary entry, from the perspective of Stella Blanche, which I had to code a certain amount of words to give away a clue for a puzzle, where the player would use a cipher to solve the code. This journal entry also had to incriminate Stella and make her seem more suspicious. This diary wasnât very well written in my opinion and I would like to have spent more time on it, but I had to move on to more important pieces of work. Found below:
By this time basic puzzles were in the game, and the easier basic parts of the game were in, including some of my writing. I was then tasked with writing 3 dialogue trees in a couple of days and implementing them myself into the game. I wasnât sure if it was possible for me to finish them, but I gave it my best shot. In the end I wrote the 3 trees, and they werenât that bad. As you can see below, they worked similar to visual novel games. The 3 trees I wrote are found below.
 (Edit: Iâm quite proud of these dialogue trees and I can see myself enjoying writing these in the future for a larger game. I saw Becky writing hers for âRemnantsâ and I felt like I would also enjoy writing these, as they look like something I can spend a lot of time working on and actually feel like Iâm contributing something worthwhile to the game.)
I found writing these dialogue trees proved to be quite difficult, as my team did not understand how long it would take to write these to a good enough standard, and it made my morale drop quite significantly. In the future I will make sure that I explain properly how much time long pieces of writing will take, so Iâm not rushed and thought to be doing no work.
After working on these dialogue trees, I wrote two different ending scenarios that the players can get, depending on whether they picked the right suspect or not. These were then taken by Lizzi, who would draw the two different scenarios and then passed to Susie who would animate them. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and only basic art and animations could be done on these.
I found writing these quite enjoyable, and if the team had more time and weâd been able to finish the ending cut-scenes it would have been great. In the future, I will make sure to work closer with the artists if we are planning out anything large like this.
The animator Susie was also a good artist, so she drew some character concepts from my writing and took my idea of giving each character a particular colour, and it was quite nice to see this as it gave my characters more charisma. Below is the concept art of the character Lilith Marcellus, drawn by Susie.
In the end our game was barely finished and did not have much of anything implemented, as everyone piled assets on the programmers in the last couple of days, which of course is unfair. In the future I will make sure to work closer with the programmers to get more in earlier, and to try and learn myself how to implement my work.
The feedback we got was:
Plan more effectively, and get assets in quicker.
Donât just design puzzles to give the players something to do, design them to further the plot.
Actually use the assets.
Provide instructions
