You, professor Wendy, have been told by the Department of Linguistics of Miskatonic University that your colleague, professor Wendell, has been absent for the 4 courses of linguistics yesterday. You decided to pay him a visit to see if he is OK. However when you entered his apartment, you immediately noticed the room was filled with strange symbols, could this be a clue...?
Here is the game. <=Click (PC, Google Drive)
** CAUTION: Some basic linguistic knowledge is required **
This is an experimental project that is more focused on game design than best programming practices. The context of this project is to create a prototype in less than a month that focuses on narration and mechanism, for a course named Narrative Design. Our team, with 3 members, decided to create a game that is based on Linguistic Puzzles ( ref: IOL). At the beginning we also thought about linguistic determinism, but it is just a hard concept to build in just a month as it needs lots of puzzles. Half of our time was dedicated to construct the fictional language, inventing the plot, and designing the puzzles (though there are only 3~4 of them), and as usual, I drew the sprites and did the visual effects...
The game is pretty short (but probably not that obvious if you are not used to linguistic puzzles), it has 2 endings. If one day I find this thing interesting I may add new contents, but that is probably after Toreiroku.
* Don't press the C key. That may cause some unexpected behaviour.*
Afterthoughts
The game was well received during the public playtest with the rest of the class. The puzzles are intriguing, the story has the peculiar feel of a lovecraftian world, and the visuals correspond to the theme of the game. Cthulhu lovers are quite hyped during the session.
Of course, it is not perfect. The main complaint was the lack of instructions, so the player may end up clicking random stuff at the beginning, hoping something to happen. It is actually a not so easy problem to tackle, because it is actually a balancing problem - too much instructions can make the game too linear and the fun of exploration will be gone. Too little instructions will make the player headless. In our game we carefully designed each phrase to suggest what to do next, without exposing the story too early, but that didn't seem to work well. We imagined that the player is very calm, sits before his/her pc, without any distraction, and in this scenario it is easier for the player to pay attention to the subtle details we planted in the game. In the public playtest, it was not the case... so that can be a reason why the playtester failed to notice the details.
The puzzles are significantly harder than I thought it would be. The 2nd puzzle took the playtester at least 5 minutes to get on the right track (I thought it would be quite obvious). Well, this is the famous "developer difficulty" effect. It's basically how a magician and her audience perceive the same trick.
Finally, the class all agreed that puzzle games like this is among the hardest game to design, and for a prototype, we did well.