Wild Space, the anthropomorphic animal alien dating simulator has been coming along nicely for the past couple of days. Here are some of the iterations and development notes. You can play the whole game here: https://lwcoding.itch.io/wild-space
The overall “message” of my game is buried in the narrative that the player enacts. The main character is an astronaut who has purposefully isolated themself from humanity, who gets a chance to find belonging through alien life. The player must make choices that determines if they will (1) be alone forever, (2) find companionship in a space that they never considered initially, or (3) die in the vacuum of space. (Technically, there are five different endings, so this is a small oversimplification.) In a way, this game aims to get people more comfortable with talking to people different than them. I attempt to convey this message through also making the aliens anthropomorphic animals, otherwise known as “furries”.
I want this game to be unfamiliar to those who do not identify as furries, but not be offensive to those who do identify as furries. So, to test my game appropriately, I hosted a couple of playtests ranging across a variety of audiences! Introducing: Marielle, Altair, and Ari.
Marielle is a Stanford student and game designer in the CS377G class (see Figure 1). She does not identify as a furry, but during the playtest, expressed her liking of characters like Purble because of their physical characteristics and portrayals, claiming that he looked like a “KPop boy” (see Figure 2). Throughout the game, she expressed a lot of curiosity about the plot and claimed that the game felt very “finished”, despite it being a rough draft (which I was very proud of). You can view a video of them briefly playtesting the game here: MariellePlaytest.mov (the embed did not function properly).
Figure 1: Playtesting with Marielle
Figure 2: Purble, an anthropomorphic dog creature in the game
Some notes that I picked up during Marielle’s playtesting session:
- In the beginning, context can be established better. For example, “Since day one” → should specify what day it is now, and “Recall a fond memory” → be specific what this memory is
- Too many useless options when talking to Glarp Obscure
- “Why do they look like kpop ideals LOOK like seriously”
- Laughed everytime the heart came up in front of the character
- Bug: Should not be showing monitor with silhouette at start of Day 2
- “I like Purble… NOOOoo Purble (because it wasn’t implemented)”
- Bug: Should be playing music other than main theme in Day 2 and Day 3
- Interesting insight: Thought the MC was male (choose more ambiguous gendered name)
- Bug: Should not say Type to interact on being saved ending
- Sounds helped change how she was supposed to feel (Marielle)
- Felt the transition between floating in space and being on the spaceship at the beginning was abrupt
- “Sometimes they wink at you, sometimes they gave you love hearts. I loved that”
Altair is a student at UC Berkeley who was over for a weekend, and offered to help playtest. He does identify as a furry, so it was interesting to see his live in-person reaction while playing the game. Given his focus as an astrophysics major, he gave some good comments on the overall theming of the game. He also told me that space didn’t have an atmosphere so I had to rewrite a lot of the “formal reports” throughout the game.
Figure 3: Playtesting with Altair
Some notes that I picked up during Altair’s playtesting session:
- Told me that space has no atmosphere… so it was factually a little inaccurate
- An initial dialogue box said that the protagonist was scared others would think they were crazy for seeing aliens… but this is ironic because the protagonist’s job is to look for aliens
- Overall, felt the story was on a linear track to drive a plot point, except when choosing one of the three to talk to. Needs more indication that other choices manage state and makes choices matter
- Said he was initially curious when he saw the furry character, but then felt joy as he warmed up to him
- Claimed the hitbox for advancing text is too small
- Felt that the game got a little slow because of all the text after playing for a while
Ari is a furry who I met in an online community. He has playtested my game when it was at a very early stage (in my previous playtesting article), and is the artist that is helping me draw assets for the game. However, because he is mainly assisting with art and does not know about the creative direction of the game, I also had him playtest to give his insights through Discord.
Figure 4: Playtesting with Ari
Some notes that I picked up during Ari’s playtesting session:
- Similarly to Altair, wanted somewhere to look for live state changes so he could tell if his changes actually mattered
- Thought that the hearts that showed up on top of the characters when certain actions were made were confusing
- Thought the type-to-interact section was neat, but was a little unclear when he started typing and other words started showing up
- Would like a background to be added to the game (this is yet to be implemented though, since it is a prototype)
- Thought that the Day 1 dialogue was much better than the Day 2 dialogue (the Day 2 dialogue needs more fleshing out)
Overall, I’m very excited to continue developing this game. With the final development date of Wild Space coming up on the horizon, stay tuned for more space dating slop! Currently, my roadmap of changes to implement before next Monday looks like:
- Implementing routes for more characters (currently, only the Cat is playable)
- Add more interactions with the characters that aren’t simply text-based
- Make there be more of a cost if you “fail” interactions earlier on; I’m thinking that you can’t call specific characters if you have a bad initial interaction with them, which would contribute to getting the “bad ending” (this is because all of my playtesters got the “good ending” effortlessly)
- Add dialogue history for quality of life
- Consider some UI for easier state tracking, so it is easier to tell if you’re doing badly or not
- Add some promotional art to spice up the webpage for the game
Finally, for the teaching team, some questions that I currently have in developing this game are:
- Are we going to be doing a formal playtest for this game? Or will most of the playing be on the teaching team for the final grade? So far, the playtests in class have seemed pretty succinct and non-eventful.
- Do we need to create an assessment for emotional learning, similar to P1?
- Out of these animals, which do you prefer (on any subjective scale of your choice): Cat, Dog, Opossum, Bird
