Game design behind
Poppy's quest
systems
game design
for hire
Educational game designed for new administrators to learn Federal Costing Principles. It features a non-linear visual novel, point-and-click tasks, and an adorable narrative about office life.
The very first step of game design was to establish goals of the game as a product, platform, and the portrait of future users. Some of the set requirements were:
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Game should serve as an asynchronous replacement of Zoom lectures;
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It should emulate real-life work with financial documents and grant regulations;
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The audience is familiar with point-and-click controls and branching narratives;
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Game has to be web-based, and the software is not capable of saving progress.
Me as a developer also had her requirement:
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Game MUST be fun and useful.
We agreed to go with a point-and-click detective game with elements of visual novel.
To build a core game loop, I had to consider that:
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Game should be split into short levels, as saving the progress is impossible;
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Switch between visual novel and point-and-click to keep players hooked on the narrative;
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Have a progression "very easy to learn, okay-ish to master".
Soon it was time for me to design a decision tree for each of five game levels. It was very important to collaborate with content experts at this stage.
Simultaneously, I was working on a screen flow, prototyped it in the given engine, and conducted some QA tests.
When the prototype of the game was already tested, it was time to write dialogues. For each story part, I first determined its goals: what should they show about administrative work, or what will they tell about the characters.
The project itself is made with Storyline 360 and JavaScript, and implements a lot of branching both for narrative and gameplay. In this game, it is okay to fail! Moreover, the player gets to learn the actual guidelines through failing.