For my playable prototype, I gave my players mini games like Doodle Jump, Rock Paper Scissors, Coin Flips, and Patty Cake to determine if they advance their quest. I observed that the whole premise of the game falls apart if the stakes aren’t high enough / players don’t care if they lose. After my first play test, the player had no regrets despite missing out on their dream job, blowing a date with the love of their life, and missing their son’s birth for work because they had no reason to care about these things. Why would you care about a random character’s goals and dreams? So for my second play test, I made the different options more fun like including a photo of a porg and saying you have to win rock, paper, scissors to make it your pet. Or winning a magic cheese wheel. I want to flesh out these options and add weight to your decisions by adding a short description based off of how what happens if the interaction is successful or not. Maybe even tying different interactions together will increase playability and make players feel more invested in getting everything right or even feeling grateful after giving up a set of circumstances. The games I chose as mini games are fun, but maybe I could make them more relevant to the task at hand to add to the theme. I was also thinking of potentially making the option for someone to “sleep” instead of trying to do an action. Like having a bad thing happen if they fail to incentivize this option and if the player picks “sleep” every turn they get a very bad ending. Not sure, would love some input! Thank you!
