Personal Effects
Game (recommended to download and play locally instead of online): https://alisteraxer.itch.io/personal-affects
GitHub: https://github.com/bk-game/p2-game
Final Playtest Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv2nJBD76Sc
Artist’s Statement
The year is 2071. You are broke. Years of gambling have left you with a mountain of debt, and your newest employer does not seem particularly interested in whether their business is ethical. Personal Effects sends its employees into the homes of people who have recently died with one instruction: learn as much about them as possible. The more useful information you bring back, the more you get paid.
Personal Effects is a narrative investigation game. Throughout the first level, a game slice, the player leads an investigation of Joe Wood by uncovering fragments of his life through his home, possessions, records, and handwritten notes. These clues tie directly into the puzzles that are required to uncover the narrative mysteries of Joe’s life and the world you find yourself in.
When we were making Personal Effects, we knew we wanted a puzzle game with a story behind it. But it quickly became so much more than that. As we were brainstorming the setting, plot, and conflicts, the puzzles became engrained into the narrative. For instance, creating mixtures to defeat the genetically mutated trees from “New Tree Co.” revealed a world driven by maximizing productivity at the cost of life (literally!). The tone is serious, but also playful, as one finds the ironic humor in a world built to preserve life, the very thing its design took away.
Gameplay puzzle in Joe Wood’s Cabin
Target Audience
Our primary audience are players roughly sixteen and older who enjoy narrative mysteries, environmental storytelling, and escape-room-style deduction. The game does not assume prior knowledge of chemistry, biology, or challenging puzzle solving. The obstacles are solved by observing the environment, connecting information, remembering or consulting clues, and determining where previously discovered information can be applied.
The game is enjoyed most by players who appreciate narrative stories in games and take the time to read backstories and clues to piece the world together. The fun of the game comes from exploration and discovery of the world and narrative from constructing both Joe Wood’s life and the world around the player.
The game is intentionally slower than an action game. Danger exists inside Joe’s house, but the player success does not rely upon action skills like combat or reflexes. It depends on noticing details and connecting information across rooms. The target player for the game enjoys using memory and interpretation skills.
Player Exploring the Environment in Joe’s Cabin
Initial Decisions & Game Mechanic Models
We built a slice of a narrative game spanning a former gambler’s work to get out of debt by helping a company bring its employees back to life after death with their full identity. We built a vertical slice instead of an MVP as we wanted the player to experience the feel of a solving a fully built out level end-to-end. We wanted a third person physical narrative with themes around death and revival, and it evolved into a top down puzzle game centered around a dystopia about the impact of extreme societal pressure for corporate productivity.
The slice begins to build upon these themes and reveal the backstory, but stops short of revealing too much. Instead, over time as the player progresses, they learn more about the world around them. Since this is a slice, the focus is more upon Joe Wood, and how interaction with one character begins to reveal the world around them. In this slice, the player is not meant to learn too much about the world, except that something eerie is happening and there appears to be a dystopian theme.
Gameplay Loop
At first glance, Personal Effects resembles a detective game. However, the player’s purpose is deliberately different from the conventional murder mystery. The player is explicitly told at the beginning that Personal Effects pays based on how much they learn. This transforms information into the game’s central resource.
Players navigate the environment, face objects to interact with them, inspect documents and objects, collect evidence, consult inventory and notes, use tools, mix chemicals, enter codes, manipulate environmental obstacles, and return to the Investigation Station with what they found.
Concept Map of Personal Effects Game
We made the choice for Personal Effects to be a single-player game. The player plays as an unnamed investigator whose financial situation establishes motivation for their task but leaves enough room for interpretation for the player to decide how they feel about the work.
The game’s conflict is not obvious. It is not player versus player or even player versus an explicit enemy. Instead, the puzzle acts as an obstacle, while the real obstacle is the institution employing them and the society they find themselves in.
The player has an immediate goal that is minimal. They are assigned an investigation to complete. This has a binary outcome. However, optional evidence creates an opportunity for different levels of success. Each story item that is recovered by the player increases the payment by employer by $250. Thus, each level could be replayed and improved upon. The puzzle game no longer has a binary outcome of success or failure, creating greater engagement with the puzzles. Success has a gradient of outcomes.
Motivation of Player
Conflict
There is physical conflict that comes from the physical roots derived from the tree growth, the house’s locked spaces, toxic fumes, and blocked passageways. However, there is a more fundamental conflict in that there is incomplete information. The player frequently encounters a problem before knowing its solution.
Beyond physical and epistemic, there is economic conflict that also exists from debt. The player, presumably the protagonist of the story, cannot simply say no to the task. Thus, an ethical conundrum occurs. Instead of refusing the task, the player rifles through Joe Wood’s belongings and personal life. A person’s private life is transformed into institutional data, and the player is at the center of it.
Puzzle Architecture
Our core gameplay loop is a series of knowledge and object gates that require interaction with the environment to enable discovery and piecing together clues for the player to progress. There is a score that is based upon progress in collecting the items. The gates to unlocking new rooms require knowledge such as codes and puzzles such as creating mixes.
The game architecture is intentionally built to teach the player about the game world as they progress. The game is structured with clues scattered throughout the environment to encourage exploration of the space. The fog of war limits visibility to make the game more challenging and appeal to the explorer player archetype.
Visibility is limited to the room while tutorials teach the player about the game
The game map operates as a sort of puzzle board in which clues and items reveal progress and narrative over time. The puzzle provides insight into the underlying narrative. The player initially scans the rooms for meaningful details. They compare documents and written notes. They revisit previous obstacles after learning something new to see if any new insight unlocks a barrier. The player needs to distinguish between information that merely describes Joe and information that can unlock the next puzzle, which at the time of initial reading, are typically impossible to distinguish.
Most importantly, the player gradually constructs a mental representation of Joe Wood’s life and character. They do this by navigating and interacting with objects, inspecting documents and the environment, collecting objects, referring to a notebook with discoveries, and using information from one clue to solve problems in a different location.
The initial office scene acts as a minimal tutorial where players learn interaction, inventory, notes, and how to interpret information before traveling to Joe’s cabin. The bedroom is locked behind Christopher’s birthday, so players cannot enter a more private space until they have learned something personal about Joe’s relationship and also explored the space, as the birthday card is across the house in the kitchen.
Birthday card in kitchen reveals clues needed for solving puzzles
Tree growth and fumes physically block routes, forcing players to pause initial exploration, gather the right information or equipment, and then return. This prevents the whole house from being accessible at once and thus creates a controlled pace of discovery.
The game puzzles are accessible to those without prior domain-specific knowledge. The chemical puzzle spreads the ingredients, measurements, and warning about water across Joe’s notes. Players reconstruct Joe’s experiment instead of needing real chemistry knowledge. The tree-cutting puzzle gives the required order through Joe’s written observations and visible marks on the tree. The challenge is matching the written description to the environment.
Notebook records discoveries automatically for player
The notebook records important discoveries, reducing the memory burden of the game. Players still have to decide where information applies, but they are not required to memorize information like dates or chemical ratios, which makes gameplay focus more on the fun and story rather than tedious work.
Narrative Architecture
Personal Effects primarily uses an embedded narrative architecture. The game uses loops which offer slices into the dystopian world through exploration of people’s lives, and how they were lost. For instance, Joe’s story has already happened when the player arrives. The player instead reconstructs that story from what remains, learning both about Joe but also the world around them.
To onboard the player, they are given an onboarding screen at the beginning to give them a basis for the world and story they are getting dropped into. Then there are prompts which allow the player to learn the basic keybinds that will be used throughout the game alongside the basic mechanics.
When the player enters Joe’s cabin, the logbook describes the progression of the tree from a small growth in his house and on him to something he cannot remove or stop. Later entries reveal his experiments, physical decline, and eventual realization that the tree is killing him. Family photographs show Joe with a husband and daughter while a police report reveals that Christopher and Eleanor Wood were killed in a hit and run. Their birthday cards add dates and intimate details to the story.
The player uncovers new rooms that unlock personal items
This creates a discovery arc for the player that shifts between confusion about the environment to slow learning and piecing together. The cabin becomes a biography that can be walked through.
The player learns about Joe as a husband, who wrote an unsent birthday card to Christopher and admits that Christopher’s birthday is the only four-digit number he will never forget.
Then there is Joe as a father, whose daughter Eleanor appears in photographs, a handmade card, and ultimately in the worn stuffed rabbit Joe is holding when the player discovers him,
Finally, there is also Joe the victim, who realizes too late that the tree he has been experimenting upon and trying to contain is killing him. His final log entry is written not because he expects to save himself, but because the information might save whoever may face a similar danger. Joe’s logbook is a narrative pieced together that moves from curiosity, to experimentation, to physical decline, to the realization that he is dying.
Logbook of Joe in final stages of life
We crafted the game to make these identities and themes appear gradually rather than simultaneously all at once. The architecture of the narrative in space allowed us to accomplish this goal. Specifically, this was accomplished by mapping physical depth in the house to narrative intimacy. The player begins in relatively ordinary spaces with surface-level information about Joe, then must use what they learn to unlock increasingly private rooms: his bedroom, hidden spaces, and finally the room containing his body.
Because access to these spaces depends on obstacles unlocked with personal knowledge, such as Christopher’s birthday or information from Joe’s own notes, the player can only move deeper into the house by first moving deeper into Joe’s life. In this way, spatial progression becomes narrative progression. The architecture controls not only where the player can go, but also where they were able to learn increasingly intimate parts of Joe’s story. To make progress in the puzzle, the player must make progress in the narrative.
Testing and Iteration History
Playtests 1 & 2: Paper prototype (July 28, July 30)
The first in-class playtests focused on showing off the overall concept and mechanics in a paper format, which allowed us to get a feel for how the game would work. A large proportion of the flaws came from the fact that the game was designed to be completely digital, so having a physical version where one of the team members essentially played as a GM and told the testers what to do led to the game feeling too linear and quick. In addition, it was too easy as there was no fog of war or further complexity to the puzzles. Players weren’t given enough time to explore or care about the story, but ideas for how to improve the digital version that was still in progress, such as limiting actions to create a sense of urgency.
Initial paper version of game
Playtest 3: First Digital Prototype (August 4)
By the third day of testing, we had a playable digital prototype for the game, which allowed for mechanics to be explored more in-depth. The playtester, also a peer in class, found the digital environment impressive and engaging. They quickly found their inventory, cut through trees, and explored the environment. They found the game generally quite intuitive. We asked about any points of friction. Several bugs were found, such as the lighting glitching out while passing through doorways.
Both the initial playtester and the second playtester, Butch, requested minor tweaks to mechanics or the story, asking for the team to give the player a reason to care about the story of the game, and making the dialogue and notes make more sense. The primary piece of advice was that the game didn’t yet feel like a puzzle game, and the game still felt too linear. Other issues like being able to walk outside the walls of the game, the mixing of chemicals being an unintuitive mechanic to accomplish from the inventory screen, and the medical letters being unrealistic in their copy were also discussed. We responded to this feedback by fixing the bugs, such as walking outside the walls of the game, and simplifying the chemical mixture process into a set physical location.
Work in progress in godot
First room that was completed by this time
Playtest 4: Fine Tuning Prototype (August 6)
After fixing a few of the issues brought up during the previous prototype, the feedback from the next in-class tests were focused on finding glitches and unintended interactions. We continued testing with playtesters who had never played the game before. Generally, they had played puzzle games before though. Most of what was noticed was small glitches or issues, such as the interaction range for objects being too small or shadows not working properly when going between rooms. This further prepared us for working on the code over the weekend, and gave us more things to work on after fully implementing suggestions from the past few playtests. We fixes the glitches, modified the interaction range to be larger, and made shadows work properly in between rooms. We also added a new office level.
Gameplay on digital version
Initial design of office space
Playtest 5 & 6: Finalizing Refined Prototype (August 10, August 11)
After a large amount of work was done over the weekend, the next few rounds of testing focused on minor feedback. Feedback from Butch mainly focused on a need to improve narrative, which was backed up by other testers. The dialogue and text for the interactables felt unrealistic and static to the playtesters, and not enough info was given to the playtesters about the player character. The general consensus among testers about the gameplay was that the puzzles needed slight tweaks, namely increasing the difficulty slightly, as well as adding quality of life such as highlighting what object the player is currently able to interact. Thankfully, no tester believed the game was in a state that needed major changes, so we didn’t need to overhaul the game. Generally, playtesters enjoyed the game and found the puzzles the appropriate complexity and the narrative interesting. We responded to this feedback by fixing small bugs such as text overflowing from a popup and adding an onboarding flow to the game.
Gameplay of mature game version
MDA Learning Reflection
Over the refinement period, we learned the importance of pacing and puzzle complexity. Puzzles are a key part of the gameplay loop and need to offer an appealing aesthetic beyond tedious complexity. In addition, the pacing needs to allow the player to explore a narrative simultaneously in our game without getting bored or completing all narrative items quickly. We also learned how to build games in Godot and ask good questions before and after playtests.
Additions
Future additions and cuts:
- A partner that the player would swap between controlling the 2 characters
- The process of waking up in the company building and going to the boss immediately then the job
- An actual debt amount tracked to work off
- An action economy system
- Doing actions would advance time, and there would be limited time before a large change of game state or failure
- More information about the state of the world/setting with how people are forced into unfair work contracts then forced to work it out until the end, cloning them if they die so they can continue working.
- A slow build exploration of the main characters story through the lens of going through all these horrific scenes for a company
- A fully realized story and not just a slice
- Character creation
- Poker minigame
- Make more levels (dead people to investigate)
Accessibility:
We placed a highlight around items to interact with to make it easier for people with any visual disability. In addition, the colors, when relevant to a puzzle, are labeled to help anyone with color blindness.
Colors are labeled in game
Design Sketches or Notes
(Included in Playtest and Iteration History section)
Links
Game (recommended to download and play locally instead of online): https://alisteraxer.itch.io/personal-affects
GitHub: https://github.com/bk-game/p2-game
Final Playtest Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv2nJBD76Sc
Final Playtest time stamps:
2:50 Player expression of joy at presence of notebook, successfully finding the notebook.
4:20 Player uses learned game mechanics (notebook) to further advance in the puzzle, demonstrating success of mechanisms. Player successfully advances to the next level.
6:30 “That seems bad” – The green gas elicits the appropriate reaction from player as the screen begins to fill with a green hue. Subtle hints inform the player appropriately without making it so obviously stated that the game loses its appeal.
22:20 The puzzle solution is found and the player expressed both frustration but ultimately satisfaction with finally completing the puzzle. “I hate that, but in a way that I hate it because I love it and I didn’t think of it”. Puzzles are complex enough that player experiences tension but possible enough that they are completed in appropriate time.
31:20 “Once I figured it out, it was rewarding. I felt like its a good length for a puzzle.” The pacing and puzzle complexity were validated from player’s feedback.
AI Disclosure
Claude Code was used to assist in building the game. The narrative and ideas were primarily human-made and done collaboratively. Iterative human playtesting drove the improvements in the game. ChatGPT was used for improving wording.
