Final Build: https://wliu.itch.io/cloudy-paws
Megan Liu, William Liu, Jimming He, Everett Lee, Daniel Kim
Artist’s Statement:
Our mechanics, level design, asset production, and dialogue were all driven by our goal of telling a heartwarming story about a dog, in limbo, finding its way back to its owner. Our environment and world building was also strongly inspired by the rainbow bridge poem below, which is a popular poem about passing pets:
This is visually reflected in the “grassy clouds” full of wonderful items for dogs, like beds and toys, and the safe nature of a heaven is incorporated in our mechanics and puzzle design. Ultimately, we wanted players to be relaxed by low-stakes but challenging puzzles that tied into the narrative and engage the player in Cookie’s journey back to Mia.
Model of Chosen System:
The player starts in an introductory scene where they “chase” a butterfly with their mouse, the feedback for this action is a splash sound effect and an image of Cookie jumping at the butterfly. Then, in the intro scene, the NPC’s dialogue explains that you (Cookie) are in dog-heaven. This narrative arc is followed by 7 looping levels of gameplay. The core mechanic in this is a loop of pressing a key for movement, followed by wind moving clouds in the opposite direction. The narrative arc is completed in the final scene, when Cookie returns to Mia.
Initial Decisions on Formal Elements and Values:
Players:
We wanted this game to be a relatively relaxing/calming puzzle game, so we thought it was natural that this would be a Player-versus-Environment game. While this was a puzzle game, we wanted it to feel complete-able by everyone, so the zero-sum nature of a player-versus-player game (e.g. having you race another player) wouldn’t make sense. The player-versus-environment setup allows us to convey challenge via the puzzles, while retaining an overall relaxed mood due to the lack of time stress or competitiveness.
Objectives:
We wanted our gameplay to be story-driven, so we framed the puzzles as you (a dog) finding your way back to your owner from a limbo/heaven like space. Our puzzle design reflects this as we had you continually walk from left-to-right, which is generally associated with progression (we read from left to right, and most side-scrolling games also involve progression from left to right), and the movement of clouds is a little trippy.
Outcomes:
Fitting with the cute, benevolent theme of our game’s story and art, we chose not to have the possibility of you falling off the map (and thus dying), as we believed this wouldn’t fit the overall mood of the game. Instead, we simply made it impossible to die, and included suggestions to use the reset button if you get stuck. This choice intentionally reduces the stress on the player– we wanted all players to be able to play through the story and beat the game, while maintaining a sense of loss from resetting, which encourages players to anticipate future moves and obstacles and learn the mechanics of the game. Finally, having a death mechanic would likely make the game significantly more stressful and difficult. The core mechanic isn’t a very common game mechanic, and thus most players, regardless of their experience with games, likely won’t have a perfect intuitive sense of how the clouds will move. Punishing even a single wrong move with a complete reset would likely make the game infuriating to play, so we chose not to do so. Ultimately, after traversing each color of the rainbow (indicated by the color-coded clouds), the player crosses the rainbow bridge and is reunited with their owner, Mia, and is rewarded with a splash art of Mia welcoming you back into her arms.
Boundaries:
The game’s world is mostly self-contained – it’s set in a fantasy world where dogs are sentient and speak to each other in English, have their own heaven, and are able to traverse the rainbow bridge between the human world and dog heaven. The human world at the edge of the gameplay – it only informs the beginning and end of the narrative, and most of the gameplay takes place on a cloudy, rainbow dog-heaven. This makes the game’s world quite distinctly separate from the real world. As discussed above, as the player character (Cookie) walks around cloud heaven, they are unable to pass the edges of cliffs and clouds.
Rules:
The core mechanic of the main game is that when you move in a certain direction, all of the world’s clouds and trees move in the opposite direction. We tie this mechanic to the narrative as a benevolent wind spirit that is trying to keep you safe in dog heaven, but does not harm you despite being an opposing force.
This mechanic has a few unique characteristics that can make for difficult problem-solving. For example, there is an element of parity to adjacent clouds. For example, you will never be able to walk on a cloud diagonal to you. To see this, pretend there’s a cloud to your top right. If you move upwards, then the cloud will move downwards, and now it will be to your bottom right. As a result, we chose to create new types of tiles, mountains and rocks, that are resistant to the wind. This allows clouds to change their parity, and also allows you to build up chains of clouds against them. These tile types and techniques are imperative to finding solutions for the problems, so we made sure to introduce them in the game’s early levels.
Ultimately, this creates a dynamic of testing movement, seeing how clouds move with or against you, and repeating until you reach the right side or are stuck and have to reset. Over time, the player learns to develop strategies to cluster or shift clouds repeatedly by utilizing obstacles and in order to avoid moving obstacles, like trees. Ultimately this creates an aesthetic of a thoughtful but relaxing challenge where you have to plan your future movement but will rarely be punished for a single wrong move.
Playtesting History (with a focus on Level Design and Graphics):
We had 2 major external playtests with our classmates, and also extensively playtested internally (around 3-4 sessions on multiple levels with quick iterations).
Playtest 1:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BxC6YJ0G02Ldv2UmR3ke8xzqW55lmHlA/view?usp=sharing
Our first external playtest with Group 12 was in an earlier stage of the game, but it demonstrated the core game mechanic (moving in one direction moves the cloud tiles the opposite direction). In this playtest we received positive feedback about the theming and the gameplay concept. However, they were a bit confused at first about controls, the core wind mechanic, as well as the narrative delivery (which we scripted and read aloud as opposed to being embedded in the game). As a result, we added clues, and a wind animation and sound effect. We also made an introduction/spawn space where you speak to an NPC and learn about the world, as well as a level that allows you to explore the mechanics of the game without worrying too much about solving a difficult puzzle. Our playtesters also pointed out that the game had a confusing color scheme, since the whole world was the same light shade of blue, but the clouds were brown. Based on this, we made two aesthetic changes: (1) we adjusted the dog’s colors and (2) we made each level different colors of the rainbow, which made each level more unique and refreshing to play.
The simple introduction level, which contains all of the common mechanics and has a simple solution.
Playtest 2:
During our internal playtests, we focused on learning more about effective level design. We had two main principles in mind: allowing players to learn different techniques as they advance through the levels, and also ensuring that gameplay seemed engaging and thoughtful.
Because our core mechanic is so unique, we initially weren’t sure exactly what would make levels fun to play. Through our first internal playtest levels, which were cloud-based, we quickly discovered the need for immovable platforms and impassable objects in order to make our wind mechanic actually interesting to play. (Otherwise, the puzzles are always obviously solvable, as in our introduction level). This is what led to the creation of cliffs, mountains, and trees.
Playtests 3 and 4:
Levels designed on paper.
We made various types of levels composed of lots of clouds, levels with mostly ground tiles, and levels with a mixture of trees and mountains. Through these playtests, we found that levels with more “hard” objects, or ground and mountain tiles, were more fun to play, as they gave you more opportunities to change the relative arrangement of the clouds, which avoided creating cycles where you kept moving clouds the same way. They were also easier to predict the behavior of, which made the game feel more engaging, as we could think ahead a few moves to come up with a solution.
As a result, before externally playtesting our final iteration, we aimed to include a lot of these objects to keep gameplay engaging for the player. See level 2 below:
This level uses ground tiles to create multiple islands, which creates a sense of progression through the level as you transition from island to island.
While this level lacks the islands from before, the two mountains serve an important role in allowing you to push tiles together, eventually creating a satisfying, straightforward bridge.
Ta-da!
On the other hand, we found that the most difficult obstacle to design around was the tree. The tree has all the movement abilities of a regular cloud, but can’t be stepped on. This made them especially frustrating to deal with, as they could adjust to block your path, whereas mountains have a fixed position. However, this frustration also proved very powerful, as it forces the player to consider how the movement mechanic can obstruct their route as well, rather than solely focusing on making a path of clouds. As a result, for our later (and harder) levels, we used more trees to force the player to think multiple moves ahead to prevent obstructing themselves.
For our final level, careful planning is needed to avoid creating a near-impassable tree wall like this.
Our second main goal with level design was to allow players to learn common techniques or manipulations of clouds, rather than showing them too explicitly. As a result, our earlier levels were often quite straightforward until one final crux, or most difficult section. This section would introduce a new principle. For example, take level 3:
At this point, the player has reached the central island, but they don’t currently have a way to progress.
However, going back to where they came from, they can align clouds to the end…
And complete the level by moving them upwards! This teaches how you can control important clouds to create a path from somewhere else far away, and also that sometimes you need to go backwards to progress forward!
Playtest 5 & Demo:
While we only recorded one playthrough, we have transcribed feedback from other playtesters here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lSXz-Fr7YnlPP-s4N9w7g9EnmtlBV15D48QnN_o0h7c/edit#heading=h.h4f8ocrewas1
We received overwhelmingly positive feedback on art style, sound design, the mechanics, level design, and overall narrative. However highlights in the suggestions for improvement we got were:
- It was difficult to know what level it was. It would make more sense if there is an indicator that shows how many levels there are and how many have been cleared so far.
- Knowing that there are 7 levels from the start would have been helpful!
- Maybe add interaction between Cookie and different objects at the end of each stage. Right now, there are these objects that make the player wonder what they are, but there is not anything that could be done on the part of the player.
While time constraints prevented us from adding additional dialogue or interactions, a major change added after this playtest was to have a rainbow progress bar in the top left corner indicating the number of levels completed, to give the player more clarity on progression.
