The Weekly Quack - May 2nd

Hello, Ducklings!

This week was a fairly EVIL week!

S.A.M Changes? Progress? Anything?!

Yes, yes. I know it gets repetitive to only see twine updates from us over Project S.A.M and while it is necessary for the evolution of the story, you all crave for more gameplay updates.

Well EVIL news, Ducklings, that is exactly what I am here to talk about today.

Gameplay changes you say?

Exactly. In a previous blog post I talked about my concerns with Project S.A.M asking the player to perform an action they perform possibly hundreds or thousands of times a day. If Project S.A.M wants to keep its audience engaged and entertained then it needs to evolve past that action.

To recap, Project S.A.M is about an AI who accidentally hacks into your phone believing you to be it's Secret Agent partner. You are not. In fact, you are just you. This young and impressionable AI is determined to find out what went wrong and where its real partner is. You will join S.A.M on missions to uncover what happened to his partner all while trying to fill the shoes of a Secret Agent.

How the gameplay is currently structured is through a series of chat messages to S.A.M that appear as texting back and forth between you and the AI. S.A.M. S.A.M will hack into various areas and describe the options the player has in each area. This removes a choice from the player or at least the illusion of one. Instead of the player examining an area and "uncovering" the way forward, S.A.M handles that for them.

As this occurs numerous times throughout the current set up, it begins to feel like the player is just being dragged along by S.A.M to make choices that S.A.M couldn't decide on. In a way it makes the player feel like they could be replaced by S.A.M flipping a coin or asking a Magic 8 Ball.

Our proposed way around this is to give the player an illusion of choice here. Even if we do not add additional options for the player, if we change how we present these two options we can increase player engagement and make the player feel like they've had more of an impact on how the story unfolds.

Instead of S.A.M immediately presenting the player with the two options they found, we present the player with the image S.A.M is seeing. From there the player can select items in the image and prompt a response from S.A.M on whether or not they'll be able to infiltrate the item the player selected. Even though there is still the same number of choices as before, the player now feels as though they've uncovered them instead of S.A.M. Instead of S.A.M guiding the player, the player is now guiding S.A.M in these situations.

While this change seems small, we hope it will encourage more engagement and make the player feel as though they are uncovering the mystery instead of being dragged along by S.A.M. This also allows us to expose more of S.A.M's personality based on items the player clicks that aren't hackable.

In addition to this change, we will also be revamping the story structure to not only help support this but to allow more feedback to the player about the current status of S.A.M.

Story changes as well!

Today, I was able to meet with Kevin about the story and some revisions we should consider making. The story is currently structured as one big story instead of multiple mini-stories lending themselves to the overall plot.

In other terms, it's structured like a book instead of an episodic series.

With the game being broken up into missions, we believe an episodic format will fit better. This means that each mission will be revamped to include its own miniature plot cycle but this miniature cycle will also fit into the larger plot cycle. Each mission the player completes should have a beginning, middle, and end. It should present its own problems for them to overcome with an ending that is satisfying on its own but also exposes a piece of the greater puzzle to push them to continue playing.

This aids us in a few ways. It provides satisfaction to the player throughout the game instead of midway through and at the very end. This keeps the players engaged and encourages them to continue playing. It also allows us to provide feedback to the player on how S.A.M is developing based on the player's choices.

S.A.M has the following values that are impacted by the player's responses to him and overall choices: confidence, trust, and empathy. These values adjust S.A.M's behavior and ultimately the ending of the game. Each mission ending gives us the opportunity to showcase which direction S.A.M is heading. The choices the player made throughout that mission accumulate to a single choice S.A.M makes at the end based on his current values.

This way the player can adjust their responses or courses of action if S.A.M is showing to little or too much in either of his categories.

In addition to this, we need to provide the player with more opportunities to adjust these values. We're adding key choices the player makes where each response directly relates to one of these values.

This will also help ensure a player has had plenty of opportunities to affect S.A.M's values and recover if they've manipulated a value too far or too little.

And that is all for this week!

It has been a fairly productive week even if it consisted primarily of research, brainstorming, and meetings.

We hope these changes will turn S.A.M into a better game in the long run.

Until next week, remember to be your best EVIL selves!