Routine (Play Here!)

The Idea

The Idea for this week’s game came from talks with faculty. A common trend I noticed was that a faculty member’s time is eaten up very quickly by advising, teaching, writing, and meetings. Keeping up with the deluge of TODOs seemed like an interesting idea to explore. I thought about other games that use order and increased complexity and decided to use Simon’s sequence memorization gameplay as the core.

What went right

This week I wanted to make sure that I was able to display things on the UI for instructional purposes. A game of Simon requires a moment when the correct sequence is flashed on the screen and the game receives no player input. Since I haven’t done anything close to cut-scenes in my games I felt like this would be a good step towards creating a cut-scene system. The system worked well and I suspect I’ll be using it again in the future.

What went wrong

The game does an OK job of letting the player know what to do, but when playtesting the game there were a couple of times where the playback of the pattern interfered with the player. Usually the confusion was cleared up quickly, but I’ll try to make it more clear when players can and cannot input commands.

What I learned

The biggest takeaway this week was finding out how much time should be spent flash the instructions/pattern on the screen. Too much and people get bored, or confused. Too little, and players can’t remember the pattern very well. Just goes to show how important it is to usertest.