Our team developed a very minimal prototype for the game The Purrsuit of Happiness, a survival game about fulfilling Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a cat. Here are a few things we noticed:
- Representing the hierarchy as a system proved difficult. There weren’t a lot of natural inputs and outputs that gave players choice/agency. We were also given the very useful feedback from the teaching team that this was more of a model of a game, and that it may be useful to consider other potential systems as the basis of our game within the same realm.
- We plan to do this by pivoting systems and ideally staying in the same general area of interest.
- Because of the issues in modeling the system within our game, players were a bit confused as to how to achieve it, how did choices contribute towards achieving goal; despite clear indication by the moderators.
- In future iterations, we will be sure to make player choice and actions much more clear and aim them towards the goals of the system in a more concrete way.
- Finally, we noted a lack of conflict within the game. As a singleplayer game, the primary constraint on play was introduced via a timer. However, the time limit we selected proved to be too long, and players never felt they were under time pressure to collect resources on the map with this amount of time. Ideally, we’d want to introduce a moderate to high level of struggle, as we planned to include the mechanic of a cat’s nine lives to allow for dying and restarting without losing all of your progress.
- If we were to continue down this path, we would naturally add additional conflict and difficulty by reducing the amount of time allotted during play, as well as potentially by adding additional obstacles or hostile encounters to overcome.
