Reflection
Mechanics & Types of Fun
The main mechanics of my game are: (1) viewing other people’s artworks and deciding if they were created by AI or a real artist, (2) interacting with both real and AI artists through dialogue, (3) choosing when to pay bills or delay them, (4) deciding how to spend money on groceries or risk going hungry, (5) staying late at work to earn bonuses at the cost of health, and (6) exploring the studio, home, and gallery spaces, and (7) viewing cutscenes.
These mechanics work together to build tension between survival and self-worth, creating different kinds of fun.
- Sensation from the different kinds of music, sound effects, and UI/sound from losing or gaining money
- Discovery from being able to walk around and explore the different maps and game assets
- Expression from naming yourself and being placed in the role of a struggling artist
- And last but not least, narrative from the dialogue and cutscenes
IF Design Process
For my game, I used Unity and Yarn Spinner. It was my first time working with Yarn Spinner, but since my research project also uses it, this experience helped me better understand how dialogue systems and branching narratives are structured in code. I began by mapping out the overall flow of the game—identifying possible endings, emotional beats, and how choices would connect to different outcomes.
A major turning point in development came after an early playtest with Julia, who mentioned that she wished she could “feel more like a starving artist.” Around that time, I also played Papers, Please from the Read & Play assignments, which inspired me to add a money system that would impact the player’s survival and decision-making. This change immediately deepened the experience, making players think more critically about each choice. I also added small audio cues to reinforce emotional moments—like the sound of losing or gaining money—to make those consequences more tangible.
The hard part of this all was coding, drawing, and putting it all together. I highly underestimated the manual labor of debugging, especially with a more bare library like Yarn Spinner. Having to learn the kinks of the library, peace together multiple dialogue nodes through jumps (and often forgetting a jump…) was painful, but worthwhile. I learned how to make more scalable dialogue systems with branches and how to push emotion even deeper. Playtesting revealed several improvements for evoking certain emotions.
Watching Playtests
Lastly, watching playtests gave me a sense of happiness, but also fear. There were several bugs at some point like getting stuck before reaching the next part, missing colliders for some reason, and Yarn issues. Seeing them unravel in real time when someone chose a different branch then I tested for was gut wrenching. While I got lots of positive comments about the appearance and unique mechanics of my game, I felt overwhelmed during the entire thing about finishing what I had scoped out and digitizing all of my 3 acts. With each new part of the story that I added came new scripts and even more debugging. Sometimes, it came with tech debt when I tried to reuse the same script for similar things like an artist vs. a normal NPC. Overall, the experience was stressful, but rewarding, as I finally got to see the game played start to end with TONS of emotion (or maybe Julia is just very expressive).
POV Lucas and I in the hospital after overworking on making Unity and Yarn Spinner work
Overall, I learned that using a game engine = more flexibility for adding cool mechanics to your game, but also you shoot yourself in the foot for the P2 project, as now you have to add things like your own history log or debug 20 different Yarn functions. Lastly, I put over 50(?) hours into making the game between drawing the character art, drawing the flashbacks, piecing together an asset pack I bought, finding music and SFXs, coding, setting up the game, writing the dialogue, revising the dialogue VARIOUS times, debugging, etc. Lucas and I were always in the computer lounge during these last 2 weeks…
