Group 12 – Nick Hafer, Calvin Laughlin, Diego Valdez Duran, Peter Ling
This week we’ve tried expanding our story line and adding more puzzles (goal is 9-12 by the end, we’re currently around 6!). Before, we just had random puzzles coming one after another. Now we’re adding a lot more “computer” narration and character narration (the heist leader that is guiding you through the story) to give the player a better sense of what is happening at the start, and why the heck they even have to complete these puzzles.
We feel like our game definitely “feels” pretty hacker-y in terms of art style. To accomplish this, we’ve used Terminal from the start and wanted it to feel like hackertyper.com or the Matrix (with the 0/1 falling down the screen). In the new storyline (Act 1 out of 3 is drafted so far), we have a lot of computer jargon that gets printed on the screen like “>>> ACCESS DENIED”. We also start the game off by giving the player an option to create their own username so that the playthrough feels more personal and they have more stake in it. This is also a way to make the game funnier since the narrators will say your name a lot and you can add ridiculous names.
We currently don’t have a system to give hints to players. We want our game to be difficult and we believe that if you need a hint, we haven’t designed the game right or you haven’t tried hard enough/gotten skilled enough to complete the puzzle just yet! That being said, we might add some hinting features to the game in the form of the narrator talking to you while you solve puzzles. Our puzzles currently rely on constraints that make the puzzle difficult: time, # of lives, etc. so that even if you fail the puzzle, you’ve learned something and you’ll probably do better on the puzzle the next time you play it.
A few things we want to test are:
- what is the best way to read text during narration? “space to skip” or time based or any other suggestions?
- is there too much storyline at the beginning right now? does it feel like a story?
- open to more feedback of any kind!
Github if you want to play: https://github.com/calvinlaughlin/hackr
Here are some screenshots of the beginning 2 screens of our game:
