Final Deliverable
- Embed or link to your game: Consider the placement of your IF link or embedding – do you want us to play first, before reading about the process? Put it at the beginning. Or, if you want us to read the process first, put it at the end.
Play first:
https://judyhjy86.github.io/what-i-meant-to-say/
- Branching Choice Map: If your game has branching paths, create a map summarizing major/impactful choices and the possible outcomes/endings from each of them.
*F – means freshman year; S: Sophomore; J: Junior; H: Home/Senior year.
- Overview: High level premise and overview of the game, initial concept mapping if you’d like, etc. “How did this idea/experience pop into your head?”
What I Meant to Say is a short narrative game about four years as an international student at a university where everyone speaks Velen, an invented language, followed by a trip home where your own first language no longer fits either. Each year is a handful of conversations. In each one you see what you want to say, but you can only build a reply from the words you actually have, often against a timer, and whatever you’ve managed when time runs out is what gets said.
I got the idea from reflecting on my own early experience as an international student, so I wanted to create a game for people to experience the kind of obstacles I went through when I first came to a new country without the best fluency in language: What does it feel like to know exactly what you mean and not have the words for it?
People usually talk about learning a language in a new country as a vocabulary problem. But for me, most of the struggle is social. Conversations don’t wait for you. The joke lands before you’ve figured out what it meant. A classmate says your idea first, just because their sentence was ready sooner. And going home doesn’t fix it, because by then the words for half your life only exist in the other language.
The core idea behind the game mechanic is that your agency grows with your fluency. It peaks in Junior year, then drops again when you go home. Every year changes what you can hear and what you can say, so the same mechanic feels different each time. The whole point is to make you search for words and struggle through it, sometimes without enough time to finish.
Player’s journey: The game takes place in two countries over four school years. Freshman through Junior year happen in a university town abroad where everyone speaks Velen. Senior year is winter break back home in Ostra, where everyone speaks your first language, shown in plain English.
Understanding: I hope at the end of the game, the player should feel the gap between what they meant and what they managed to say, and understand that the gap is about time and words, not intelligence.
I also wish the players could take away a sense of empathy and/or feeling seen depending on their own background. For students and faculty who have never studied in another language, it aims to build empathy for moments they would otherwise miss. For international, bilingual and multicultural players, it aims for recognition, the feeling that someone captured an experience they know.
- History Versions of Game: Demonstration of improvement over time through playtesting and iteration. (I.e. Did the results of your assessment improve from earlier versions of the game? Why are you convinced that the game is better now at achieving its objective(s)?)
- See the google doc
- Photos/Video Clips of Game Testing: For each playtest, include the number of players and any available demographic information (gender, age, background). Summarize feedback and how it informed certain changes. For Video/Audio, please also include relevant timestamps of moments that stand out/serve as particular evidence.
- Included in the google doc
- Reflection: A short reflection section at the end of the article that roughly portrays the following information: “I did this, I learned this, next time I’d do it this way.” (This is separate from the P2: reflection assignment).
I initially drafted out the idea very roughly when chatting with my friends. I got inspired by Emily Is Away’s story structure (one timepoint per year + across four years) so I decided to use that to capture the language progression journey in this game. Then I started building the game plots, and through the rounds of playtesting I realized that a lot of the design decisions I made worked perfectly fine in my head whereas would appear irrelevant or redundant or weird in the player’s perspective.
The timer was the first example. In the paper prototype at first, I would count “one, two, three” for players and that felt right to me. Once I built it in Twine, players had to read the screen, find the words, and drag them into a sentence, and three seconds became impossible. Even at ten seconds, most playtesters still turned on relaxed timing. The same thing happened with the “You think” line in Freshman year. I wrote it to show the gap between what you mean and what you can say, but one playtester pointed out it basically gave away what the other person said, which took away the deciphering. And Mom’s text in Junior year, a moment I really cared about, was forgettable until I made the player actually type the reply and delete the Velen word themselves.
What I learned is that players notice right away when what they do doesn’t match what the story says. If they build a full sentence and the character answers something else, or the story asks them a question and the only button says “Keep listening,” it breaks the experience. I also learned that discomfort and frustration are different things. I wanted players to struggle for words, and they did, but the struggle only means something if they feel they had a fair chance. Their sense of agency came from having time to put words together. I also realized the game was all struggle with no reward, so I added a scene where your Velen finally pays off, helping a first-year who laughs a beat late, just like someone else helped “me”.
Next time, I’d move to the digital version and playtest it much earlier, because the paper prototype hid most of these problems. I’d decide first what I want players to feel in each scene and cut anything that doesn’t serve it. I’d write fewer, deeper conversations instead of many short ones, and make more choices to carry forward into later years. And I’d test with more players who have never studied in another language, since that’s who the game is really for.
