Game Designer (rhsojitra@gmail.com)
Brain Jenga
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Team Size : 5
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Responsibilities: Game Design, Narrative Design, Programming, Producer
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Duration: 2 weeks
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Tools/Engine: Unity, Quest 2
This interactive experience was created as a part of the famous Building Virtual Worlds course. The prompt that was given to us for this as a constraint was as follows:
"Create a highly interactive VR world for the Quest 2: a world in which the guest must help another character achieve a goal. The character is frightened or intimidated by some challenge, some situation, some thing, or some other character that stands in the way of achieving that goal."
Prompt
Gameplay Video:
We decided to make an experience where the guest i.e. the player acts as a therapist who treats their patients in a unique way i.e. by literally going into their patient's mind and pulling out the fears and making the patient face those fears. The character whom you are helping is a patient who has a fear of elevators and needs the player to get rid of this fear.
The player must pull out the bad memories of the patient very carefully as his whole brain is in the form of a Jenga tower. So, the player must be careful that they do not make the patient's brain collapse.
The Idea:
Design Process:
- The first scene of the game where the therapist(player) talks with the patient is a little confusing because the therapist has a voice while the patient has dialogue bubbles which felt inverted to the player. Reversing this interaction would be better as it might feel weird to someone playing in VR to have a voice when they are not speaking anything in real life.
- The use of clipboard to give instructions to the player worked but it does not blend with the world as the instruction on the clipboard are direct, real world instructions on which buttons to press but the rest of the environment in the game uses indirect control instructions like the 4 plates on the table suggesting that there are 4 bad blocks and also the color of the bad blocks which clearly segregates them.
Improvements that can be made in future:
- Players could reach the winning state of the game easily due to the changes in the gameplay. They only failed when they tried to fail actively by pulling out a block that was visibly not easy to pull.
- The interest curve of the story made more sense combined with the gameplay, as the player now explored all the good blocks and heard all dialogues to find the bad memory block. As that good blocks contained normal likes and dislikes of the patient, the player felt more connected and related to the patient. Player could easily find the bad block as hinted by the number of plates on the table and completed the game.
Results -
- Tested the difficulty of the game to see if the players were able to reach the winning condition often.
- Tested the interest curve of the story and gameplay to see if they were harmonious.
Playtest 3 -
With the results of the previous iteration it was found that simulating real Jenga physics was not the best option rather, manipulating the player to feel like they were playing real Jenga was the clear option. I found that the best option was to tweak some parameters of the physics material and the rigidbody physics. So, the physics was changed such that when the player grabbed a bad memory, the linear drag of all the other blocks would increase until the bad memory block is pulled out of the tower so that they have a lot more friction and don't collapse. Also, due to the grab component in the VR controller script in Unity, the blocks had their Y rotation enabled by default. So, the rigidbody rotation in the Y and X axis of the blocks was disabled until they completely pulled out of the tower to make it feel like a real Jenga and also make the fail state less recurring.
Apart from that, for the confusion on what to do with the pulled out blocks, we made four plates and the models were such that the player could figure out that the blocks need to be placed there. For the interest curve, we hid one bad block as a good block in the tower. So, there would be 3 bad blocks initially that would be clearly visible but after pulling those three, the player will realize that there are four blocks but only three bad memories and so one of them might still be there in the tower. Also, when the player hovers over the hidden bad memory for the first time, the dialogue would be a little longer than the other good blocks and a little vague making the player more interested in that particular block. This was intended to provide the last peak in the interest curve so that it the game mechanic does not seem monotonous.
Iteration 3 -
Results -
- Players could understand the context and stakes of the game, however, they found it difficult to win. With drag being less in the Jenga bricks, it was difficult to pull out all the bad bricks without making the tower collapse. This made the game imbalanced.
- A real Jenga game has a high chance of getting to the fail state and the stakes are not that high, however, in our game, the fail state had very high stakes as the brain of the patient would collapse and the problem was that the player encountered the fail state very often like a real Jenga game.
- The game was fun because of the Jenga mechanic and it drove most of the interest curve in the game but in terms of story, there interest curve seemed flat and did not match with the game's interest curve. The players could also not figure out what to do with the pulled out bad blocks from the tower.
- Tested the overall adherence of the theme to the gameplay and tested to see if the player understood the context and stakes.
- Tested the game balance of the win and lose conditions.
Playtest 2 -
After getting feedback for our Jenga mechanic, we decided to go with the gameplay and make the environment according to our theme of being inside the patient's brain so that it is reinforced through the visuals. We incorporated sounds and dialogues for each block of the Jenga tower to indicate that each of those blocks are the patient's memories and also had a different colored texture for the bad memories of the patient.
Iteration 2 -
- Players felt that the physics felt accurate to real Jenga
- Picking out the blocks was feeling quite satisfactory with the controller grab input and it also created a rising tension with pulling out of each block.
Results -
- Tested the feel and accuracy of the physics based Jenga tower prototype.
- Tested to find out if the controller grab input in Quest 2 felt satisfactory enough.
Playtest 1 -
The first part was trying out if the physics of the Jenga tower would work on the Quest 2 hardware. So, I made a quick prototype using simple cubes and physics material in Unity and tested it as a build in Quest 2. We also tested it with other people to see if it felt like a Jenga tower.