Puzzle Design / Game Design

Description

I worked as a game/puzzle designer on We Were Here Together, the third entry in the co-op ‘escape room’ series.

We Were Here Together has 1500+ positive Steam ratings, (90% positivity) and had 42K concurrent viewers on Twitch when it came out.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/865360/We_Were_Here_Together/

My contribution

• creating puzzles, from idea to releasable content
• collaborating with a multidisciplinary team
• setting up and running playtests, analyzing and summarizing results

More…

In this project, I was responsible for creating puzzles from scratch and bringing them from idea to releasable content (ie. concepting, (paper) prototyping, whiteboxing, testing, adjusting based on tests, QA). I worked together with two other game designers and a team of artists and developers as well as several other disciplines. My biggest contribution was in conducting regular tests which allowed us to direct the team’s (design) efforts to those areas that could use that attention the most.

Praise & Press

Our school (of the arts) featured this project in an article:
https://exposure.hku.nl/verhaal/4271358/over-mutsen-mindsets-en-een-knuffel-met-een-verloren-been (Dutch)
The project has been nominated for the ‘Cinekid Golden Guppy Media Award’, an award for media products suitable for children, and has received an honourable mention for this award.

Player count

armor games: 17.222 views, 141 ratings, rating 81/100
itch.io: 6.550 views, 34 ratings, 436 downloads
gamejolt: 1.277 views, 32 ratings, 427 downloads
(note: this is a web-game)

Design

Key design decision

A third into the project, we had lots of bits and pieces of knowledge, all related to the general direction we wanted the game to go in. However, a specific, clear vision of what we were trying to achieve with the game was lacking.

I analysed the information we had and defined a single goal for the game, and went on to identify how every piece of information fit into this overarching goal. I visualized these relationships in a onepage (seen below), pointing out areas we needed to explore further.

Materials

analysis of the game as it is now, relationships between different elements and what elements still need to be improved

a paper prototype we created to test the relationship between setbacks and exploring an interesting environment

More design information, as well as the design process

Chalk Gardens Design Package (2057 downloads )

Project

Approach

try to translate the concept of ‘positive reframing’ to an entertainment game that conveys a deeper message through its mechanics.

put together a team to be able to make a full game

short research phase to be able to quickly get to prototyping and playtesting

Result / Evaluation

Complete, if unpolished, entertainment game that conveys its message through both mechanics and story.

Was nominated and received a special mention for the Cinekid Media ‘Golden Guppy’ Award. (press release)

Project was highlighted and used for promotion of all graduation projects

Great collaboration that allowed both of us to become a better professional

I should have managed the (design) goals of this project better, as it would have allowed us to create a more focused and thereby more powerful game.

Keep paper prototyping for longer when you’re both designing and programming, because digital prototypes eat up all the design time.

Description

Process

Our process was straightforward at a glance, but complex in the sense that we were trying out and improving on a lot of different ideas and elements.

By generating new ideas and prototyping those, we were able to slowly create a unique space the game could fill. This space was carved out first by trying to convey our message through the mechanics, and later by supporting the mechanics by creating a world and narrative in which you could use these mechanics meaningfully.

A lot of times the process felt like a balancing act between the two different goals of accurately modeling how it can feel to gradually break out of a certain mindset and making the experience of playing the game a fun, positive one. Though it wasn’t necessary to make the game fun or positive, it was a condition we had set for ourselves, to stay away from more horrorlike experiences.

We defined our design goals and how we wanted to run the project.

Then we started generating concepts that we thought would be able to fulfill our design goals. In this we took a mechanics-first approach, because one of the goals of the project was to try to convey a message through mechanics alone, so we wanted to have a strong core mechanic.

We selected a concept we thought would be able to fulfill our design goals. We prototyped it and felt the core mechanic was lacking. We switched concepts, we prototyped the new concepts, we made variations on the new concept, we prototyped that.

By then what we were working with had become very much like a puzzle. I had intended the game to be a more open-ended, sandbox-like experience, and we created a digital prototype to try and capture the sense of exploration.

This worked but the digital prototype had many flaws as well. To be able to quickly try out different ideas, we went back to paper prototyping, and performed the above-mentioned balancing act by trying to integrate exploration with the story the mechanics were telling. After lots of prototyping and by looking back at our research we were able to reach something that more or less worked.

We started building this digitally, because we knew a lot of the work and time was in translating our paper prototype to the digital medium, providing the feedback mechanisms necessary for understanding what the game was doing and to tell players how they were influencing it.

After numerous iterations we’ve reached the current state of the game: something that achieves a lot of things to some degree, but is maybe not the most focused it could have been.

Project Role

Niels de Jong – design, programming

Joanna Siccama – art

Project Duration

22 weeks

started the 6^th of february 2018

project showcase 29^th of june 2018

armor games version (containing small tweaks) 13th of june 2019

Play time

~20 minutes

Links

https://armorgames.com/play/18618/chalk-gardens

https://red-owl-games.itch.io/chalk-gardens

https://gamejolt.com/games/chalkgardens/332358

https://www.facebook.com/ChalkGardens

Chalk Gardens Design Package (2057 downloads )

https://www.cinekid.nl/en/news/94

Around the Creek is a storydriven game in which you get to know and love weird characters while making difficult (moral) choices in order to solve an exciting mystery

Design

Key design decision

About halfway into the project, we had integrated so many design guidelines and gameplay mechanisms into the concept, that we lost sight of the core value of our game. I decided, in cooperation with my co-designer, to side-step our current goals and design goals and take time to find back the value of the game. We then strengthened this value (the uniqueness of the characters, in both art and dialogue) by building a “chunks” structure around it, based on interest curves. These “chunks” structured how we approached the latter half of the project.

Chunks structure

(for more explanation see download below)

Materials

Around the Creek Design choices (dutch) (1695 downloads )
Around the Creek Design document (Dutch) (1577 downloads )

persona created based on research using our game

early onepage

Project

Approach

create a game along with a viable plan for selling it to an audience

use SCRUM evaluation techniques in a non-SCRUM team process

create interesting characters in a living world

Result / Evaluation

a vertical slice of a complete game, with many points that need to be improved, plus an accurate view on our target audience

check everyone’s ideas about how to design a game, because not everyone designs with a target audience in mind / at all

only create prototypes to answer questions you have (also, if you don’t have questions to prototype, that’s a warning sign)

check how everyone is feeling about the project about 1/6th into the project

SCRUM evaluation techniques like daily standup and “retrospections” offer an indirect and because of that effective way of giving feedback to eachother

map out the skills and personalities of team members, and explicitly create responsibilities to fill gaps

game design documentation (eg. onepages) shows how the game has grown

prototype faster

Description

This project had to be pitched and approved first. We created an elaborate concept, and used the following weeks to start building parts of this concept and get some initial reactions. However, because we had created such an elaborate concept, we had a hard time finding the core of what we wanted to achieve. Moreover, the team was (subconsciously) divided about what direction to take the game in. This confusion came to a head about halfway into the project. At this point, we had a bloated concept and we had created several prototypes that we had not really tested, because we didn’t know how we could use the results. We spent a week finding back the core value of the game we wanted to create (the characters, both in art and dialogue), and built a “chunk” structure around this value to really put this unique value in a good light.

This “chunks” structure was modular and allowed us to fulfill our initial goal of creating a vertical slice of the complete game.

We used this vertical slice for getting an accurate view of our target audience as well as getting feedback we could use to improve the vertical slice.

We then jointly decided to stop this project, because our opinions on how to further develop the game differed on a too fundamental level.

Project Role

Niels de Jong – lead design, lead programming

Youri Stans – lead environment art, design

Esmeé van ‘t Hoff – lead writing, environment art

Loïs Vehof – lead character artist, writing

Runic Sounds (http://runicsounds.com/) – audio

Project Duration

16 weeks

started the 6^th of february 2017

stopped end of may

Play time

~20 minutes

Links

Around the Creek game page (gamejolt) (2118 downloads )

Around the Creek blog (tumblr.) (2178 downloads )

Around the Creek Design document (Dutch) (1577 downloads )

Around the Creek Design choices (dutch) (1695 downloads )

Play time

+- 4 minutes per try

Links

Play in-browser web version

Project Description

A small venture into the territory of the fantasy console PICO-8, Squashy is a game heavily based on a basic pong/breakout game.

However, the old gameplay pattern is twisted to push you towards prediction and risk-taking.

I focused on making the whole game juicier as well.

Project Role

I designed, programmed and created all art and sound assets.

The retro style is largely due to the fantasy console PICO-8

This game is an adaptation of the Squashy game found in the online magazine Picozine

Design

Materials

Minotaur's Maze Playtest (1344 downloads )

Below you can see a onepage design of the core idea of the game

Project

Approach

Incorporating ‘game feel’ into the control of the player character

Gradually making changes in a cycle of adding changes, playtesting and polishing

Fleshing out original concept while staying true to it

Result / Evaluation

Positive reactions from targeted audience

Hardware requirements (4 xBox controllers) limits marketability

Playtesting gives a way of solving discussions and answering unknowns in the design of the game

Constituting clear design goals and sticking to them gives a focused design and thus a focused experience

Not having to program gives more room to think about (level) design

Description

Well actually, the minotaur never really made it into the game.

Minotaur’s Maze started off with a single week in which the basic concept was formed by just two people. At the end of this week, the concept was pitched to peer students. Two decided they wanted to work on this concept, which gave us a team of four to create the final game.

This original concept was: unreliable information, indirect contact with other players through trails and following an unknown other being.

There were a lot of possibilities that all fitted in the original concept. At a certain point in time these different possibilities starting conflicting with eachother and we had to make a decision to keep a clean design and focused game.

We could create a game focused on exploring. When in a maze there’s a lot to explore! A symbol language and lots of details in the maze would improve this kind of game. Alternatively, we could create a game centered around a horror element, using the minotaur as an unseen threat that could pop up any moment. Our third option was making a party game, with frequent playful interactions between players.

We decided to make a party game and started valueing our game elements around positive interactions between players outside of the game, something we called ‘hectic fun’ and the design goal that there should be no dull moments in the game. You had to be constantly busy in an interesting manner.

We quickly created the basis of the game, and used that to playtest. This became a good habit: whenever we weren’t sure of changes we made or we wanted to go in two directions, we used playtests to see which change allowed the player to reach the design goals more easily.

At the end of the project we shifted focus to adding polish effects.

We spent the last week preparing for the ‘launch’ of the game, making a poster and coming up with a marketing stunt. We spread little paper coins with a text on the back prompting people who found such a coin to come play the game in the room we set up Minotaur’s Maze-style: dimly lit, with flickering torches on monitors and a big couch to play the game on.

Because this was one of the longer projects I’ve worked on, and because the basis of the concept had already been established, this feels like one of the most thought-out and clear designs I’ve made so far. That’s funny, because at the same time I see a lot of improvements still to be made.

Project Role

Niels de Jong – designer, some programming

Youri Stans – environment art, designer

Mike Ottink – programmer, designer

Annelieke Henzen – character art, audio

Project Duration

11 weeks

started the 10^th of june 2016

published the 29^th of august 2016

Play time

10 minutes

Links

Note: the game is designed for playing with 4 xBox 360 controllers, and plays best using that setup. However, you can play with up to three players without any xBox 360 controllers.

Note: when playing the game using keyboard, make sure Num Lock is turned on, or the second player’s controls won’t work.

Minotaur's Maze windows (1204 downloads )

Minotaur's Maze Documentatie (1607 downloads )

Haunted House is a bad 3D puzzle platformer. It has an interesting project and design process.

Project

Approach

Heavy focus on why the things that are designed are the way they are, looking for the arguments to support a design

Learn to work with and from another dedicated designer in the team

Try to establish what is wrong with the team, how I can function within the team and how we are going to get a sufficient end result with that team, and how to prevent these situations in the future

Result / Evaluation

extensive use of design models such as the Quality, Frequency, Clarity model for mechanics

major improvement in supporting designs with reasons why you would make a certain decision (or not)

fascinating to see how different people with a design background approach design when compared to people without this background

learned the importance of establishing everyone’s intentions early on

gained some experience working with audio

Description

This is definitely the most interesting process I’ve experienced so far. It hasn’t necessarily resulted in the most interesting product, however.

In this project we worked together with students from the Utrecht University. In an early phase of the project, we struggled to form our ideas into coherent concepts. Everyone seemingly wanted to do something else. When we did agree on something, we ran into the same problem as soon as we started specifying details. Looking backwards, I’d say the main problem here was a discrepancy in design knowledge. I was grounded in more than a year of design ‘thinking’, and did not realise others might not have that same knowledge and thus would look on design in a very, very different way.

Anyway. In the project it gradually became clear every decision could be reverted if it did not fit someone’s vision. This forced me to look for the reasons why a certain decision was important, so I could counter attempts coming from personal likings or dislikings of certain decisions. I started looking for arguments and relationships that would support a design choice. Additionally, I reconstructed our decisions made so far to be able to show and tell why exactly we did something, and why going in another direction now was a good or bad idea when taking the previous decisions into consideration.

So we worked on an elaborate design, looking for relationships, tuning our ideas to fit an experience. This was a great experience as a designer. Unfortunately, there was a) too little time to fully implement the design and b) we still had a dysfunctional team, with the one building our game unwilling to make changes, presumably afraid we would lose what we already had. Still, it was a great learning experience. Looking back I would have forced a conflict early in the project, to make clear what intentions everyone has and to look for opportunities to continue the project in a different way.

In the final two weeks I mainly focused on adding audio for the game, to create a richer experience.

This way of supporting your design for arguments and relationships is something I apply in other projects now as well. A possible negative side-effect of this approach is that it can seem like everything is set in stone to other team members, because you can answer almost every why-question related to design.

Project Role

Niels de Jong – designer, audio

Kevin van As – designer, bits & pieces

Mike Ottink – Lead Artist, designer

Dwight Peters (Utrecht University, Game Technology) – Programmer

Merle Delen (Utrecht University, Game Technology) – Project Lead, artist

Project Duration

11 weeks

Originally published on 11-12-2015

Play time

20 minutes

Links

Haunted House Design Checkpoint (1294 downloads )

Haunted House Design Document (1213 downloads )

Haunted House windows (785 downloads )

Haunted House Project Documentation (1204 downloads )

Design

Materialen

Defire early concepts (Dutch) (1749 downloads )

Project

Approach

Create the time to try out several possible solutions

Guide the creative process

Quickly create a working product the company can potentially use

Result / Evaluation

Playable prototype in three weeks

When you have a specific target audience, you need to do thorough research before you come up with ideas. Afterwards, check these ideas to see if they match. This way you know for sure whether your initial assumptions about the target audience are correct or not, befóre you build anything based on those assumptions.

When having conversations, make sure all people involved have the same goal or you’ll get a bad feeling and a fighting-like atmosphere. This can be done by simply asking what the goal is.

You can do an astounding amount of work in three weeks, but there is relatively little time to leisurely explore all aspects or possible solutions.

Consolidated the approach of coming up with multiple ideas and prototyping them before choosing one.

Description

In the “Sell it” project, we were tasked with creating a game that would raise awareness about fire safety in student apartments. This was a school assignment in combination with MonkeyBizniz.

Following an iterative process where we toyed with different ideas while keeping an eye on how we were going to convey the message, we finally created a game where players implicitly experience good and bad practices in fire safety. Example: They have to reach a fire exit before they are themselves consumed by fire, but someone placed some boxes in the way. This gives players the notion that cluttering the hallways is potentially dangerous. Other playercontrollable characters panick when confronted with fire, mimicking how people can react in case of a real fire.

Project Role

Niels de Jong – Designer, programmer

Sam Morris – Artist, trailer

Emmelie Hoberg – Artist

Ruben van der Laan (Art & Media Management) – Marketing & Manager

Lex Creemers (Art & Media Management) – Marketing & Manager

Project Duration

3 weeks

Originally published on 17-6-2015

Play time

10 minutes

Links

Defire windows (1791 downloads )

Defire Project Documentation (1920 downloads )

Project

Approach

First time choosing my own team

A very elaborate inspiration phase because of the tour to Disneyland Paris

Trying to create one focused (WTF – ) effect

Trying to let players experience that their perspective may not be the perspective

Result / Evaluation

Working, alienating experience made possible by two players seeing something else

Playtest provided us with an amazing amount of information we could use to improve this unconventional concept. Also, it was a blast to do.

concepts which require complex technical parts must be proven to work or rejected in an early stage

Description

In this project I was able to create a team with a diverse and balanced mix of disciplines. We went on an excursion to Disneyland Paris for inspiration on “ride” experiences, which we incorporated into the final project.

We created an experience where two players think they are seeing the same things, but are actually experiencing something different. This creates an alienating effect which leaves you wondering whether your perspective is the ‘correct’ perspective.

We did this by having one player take the role of ‘controller’, able to steer an avatar through a game world. In this world there were various interactions possible (some examples: batting a piñata, kicking a soccer ball around, but also releasing children from prison (or electrocuting them))

Meanwhile there was a second player watching this through VR-glasses (google cardboard)(eventually there was too little time to get this piece of technology working so we substituted with a second screen) This second player was allowed to make general comments about how he felt about what he saw, but apart from that neither of the players were allowed to communicated. This rule was installed after we discovered the experience ended as soon as people found out they were seeing different things.

There was a catch however. The second player saw (and heard) something different than the controlling player. In his world the piñata was a corpse, the soccer ball was a brain, and the children were monsters that followed the player. At the end of the ‘ride’, players were able to communicate freely and then they soon found out they had been experiencing something entirely different.

With this ‘ride’ we aimed for creating one big ‘reveal’ moment where players suddenly saw things shift into focus and realize their perspective of the world was not necessarily the same as someone else’s. This experience goal is something I return to more often, as I believe more awareness of this can make people more openminded.

Project Role

Niels de Jong – programmer, designer

Silver Huber – project lead, programmer, designer

Robbie de Gier – hardware programmer, designer

Rick Kamp – Artist

Emmelie Hoberg – Artist

Project Duration

9 weeks

Originally published on 1-6-2015

Play time

5 minutes

Links

Double Slit Experiment windows (1463 downloads )

Double Slit Experience Project Documentation (1729 downloads )

Stairwell is an artgame about growing old.

In 5 levels, it tells the story of a young man visiting his grandmother. A game with literary aspirations.

Play time

+- 2 minutes per level

+- 10 minutes in total

Links

Play in-browser web version

Stairwell windows (815 downloads )

Project Description

Old people have always made me feel slightly uneasy. They know of a world that just isn’t there anymore, and I have the idea that after a certain point, you simply lose touch with the world as it is now, because that nonexisting world has grown so large.

I created this game for a competition with the theme ‘dubbel’. This is a Dutch word that can be interpreted as either ‘double’ or as ‘ambivalent’.

This game was somewhat unique in that I designed it (almost) completely upfront, taking one week. I created the game in the two weeks after that.

Originally published on 29-8-2012

Project Role

I designed, programmed and created all art assets.

The music was made by blazingdragon, the sound effects come from freesound.org (see the credits)

Nostalgia: homemade version originally published in 2009.

Just another snake game, really. There are three different downloads.

• Classic snake is simply snake, no strange things.
• Snake + extra features is snake, but with some pickups that’ll change your speed, and there’s some annoying stuff in the way, so you’ll have to search for your ‘snake dots’
• Upgradeable snake features upgrades instead of a snake that gets longer and longer.

Play time

Classic Snake: +- 4 minutes

Snake + extra features: +- 4 minutes

Upgradeable Snake: +-25 minutes

Links

Snake Classic windows (1603 downloads )

Classic Snake Plus windows (1436 downloads )

Upgradeable Snake windows (1390 downloads )

Project Description

I remember spending a lot of time on the upgrade-able mode. Playing it now I mainly see a lot of flaws that prevent this from being enjoyable to play. Also, you get a feeling for the kind of ideas I had, because relatively little iteration has been done on everything that’s in the game.

It’s cool to have such an old project and be able to look back and compare to what I make nowadays.

Project Role

I designed, programmed and created all assets except all the sound assets.