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- Dagada's Story -

Team Size : 2

Role : Game Designer

Engine : Unity

Time : July - August 2022 (2 months)

Strengthening the vision

When first seeing the game trailer at an indie dev meeting, I quickly fell in love with the concept. But both the developer and I agreed: the game was struggling to find its design vision and lacked any engaging core loop or meaningful mechanics. And this is how I started to work on Dagada's Story.

a. Identifying the client's goals

Before even starting out on the project itself, I had to start with the person carrying it: the client. So, we spent a couple of hours doing some introspection to better identify his goals. They can be things such as:

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Making your dream project

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Reaching out to a certain audience

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Building a game that sells

None of these goals are mutually exclusive but:

  • They come at a cost (of time, research or skills)

  • Can lead to conflicting choices (should I make risky design decisions or should I play it safe ?)

Focusing on the most important one was thus crucial. And for Matthieu Lu, it was to make his dream project.

b. "A story about friendship, separation and climate change"

This is how we ended up summarising the game in one sentence. But those words can lead you in a lot of directions if not detailed further, so we still had to choose which one to follow for each important word.

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Defining the dynamics between the protagonist and his friend was key, both for the narrative and the core mechanics

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And along the way we scrapped some directions that would not work out for the experience or gameplay we wanted

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We were soon able to identify what about nature and climate change we wanted to explore: the various ways people react to it. Action verbs that would prove key for Gameplay & Systems Design

c. The Game Experience and the Player Motivation

When it comes down to player motivation and the game experience, I generally don't use any framework. But this time, I wanted to try out some tools to approach these design areas in a more structured way.

Here are the ones we got the most out of:

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Marc Leblanc's 8 Kinds of Fun gave us the proper amount of data to know what core experiences we wanted the game to have on a general level

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Jason VandenBerghe's framework, and more specifically the Competence-Autonomy-Relatedness part, also proved very helpful to double check that the game provided long-term purpose.

d. Market Analysis

The major goal of this project was not to sell or to find a specific audience. But, no matter how much that game planned to be a dream project coming true, it still had to define where it would find itself among other titles. The research phase not only allowed us to discover new references, it also helped define broad design boundaries for the game and realise what it shouldn't try to be.

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Finding the proper design range and spot while avoiding middle grounds

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Finding what kind of puzzle-platformer we wanted to make, and how to approach major areas like ship repairing

Designing around the vision

a. Building the world

When I joined the project, there was already a lot of content story-wise: backstories, character relationships, a detailed story and so on. But all this content struggled to find proper structure, or a way to be streamlined in the game withouth turning it into an interactive book.

The solution can be broken down into three approaches:

  • Environmental Storytelling (for which I can't show much)

  • Gameplay mechanics (which I'll talk about later)

  • and Worldbuilding frameworks

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Two frameworks - the latter being a more complex version of the first - to better structure your worldbuilding process. They helped a lot to refine, remove or add content for the game's world. Other very good frameworks proved to be either too simple, too complex or irrelevant for our needs.

b. Designing the Gameplay Loop

By then, we had already identified what the game experience, theme and key components where. It was now time to detail out it's core gameplay loop in order to see how we could make the following promises fit in a coherent and engaging way:

  • Exploration, Puzzle Solving, Platforming

  • Rich story and world

  • Climate Change, Friendship and Separation

Dagada - Gameplay Design.drawio.png

During that phase, the goal was to see if we could create a strong core loop and build the other key systems in or around it. It also helped us define what should or shouldn't be part of that core loop and thus where to put our effort first

c. Designing the Core Mechanics

There are various questions I ask myself when designing a game mechanic, but among the first is always : where does it fall on the Meaningful vs Gamy range ? And on the Concrete vs Abstract range ? The first range allowing us to define how much we want a mechanic's presence to be justified by a game's theme, and the second one how much we want that mechanic's presentation to be easily associated to what it tries to represent.

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Here, we also decided to explore a new creative process, called Gameplay Decks:

  • Define what type of mechanics you want to focus on

  • Design a couple of mechanics and rate them from 1 (bad) to 5 (good)

  • Combine them in various type-driven ways and rate those decks from 1 (bad) to 5 (good)

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Some of the mechanics that were designed that way, with the goal to tie in the puzzle-platforming gameplay with the friendship theme

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Some of the gameplay decks that were built with the mechanics. Through various iterations, they allowed us to keep some combinations, rule out others, and keep in mind that the quality of an isolated mechanic did not always transpose when put within a broader system

My Social improvements

  • Explaining design-specific concepts to a non-designer

  • Providing design solutions while letting the vision owner with the final call

  • Organising frequent meetups and ensuring everything is done within schedule

My Creative improvements

  • Exploring new tools both in term of documentation (nuclino) and design (player maps, gameplay decks)

  • Doing topic research to deliver on the themes in the best way possible

  • Tackling an area I am less comfortable with, Market Analysis

See here for the Steam page (FR only)

Further advancements where showcased at the Paris Fan Festival in April 2023 (FR only)

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