Development devlog

Overall development process

Game design

We started from the idea of "one simple meta-game rule", inspired by some experimental game design works: Baba is you, shapes and ladders.

The thing we chose to play with is the concept of small creatures jumping on furniture inspired by this real objects + projection mapping game and a fantasy animation film series The Garden of the Sinners. We thought about piano keys and appliance button panels and then settled down on the laptop keyboard. Then we iterate on the idea and try to find a balance point where there's good player experience but the characteristics of a real keyboard are also fairly well preserved.

We add several mechanics to the realistic keyboard for playfulness:

• Puzzle and riddle to solve by keyboard input;
• Enemy, the cat paw that can potentially kill the player;
• A companion or a placeable item, the jelly.

Roles

Ardak: programming (player, platforms, jelly, typing, camera, cat paw damage & player life), animation (game objects), music and sound design, level design.

Allie: programming (typing, jelly, scene transition, cat paw animation), animation (UI), art and illustration, mechanics & level design.

Design docs

Visual references

Doodle style drawing

Storyboard

Design doc in progress

Unused riddles, excerpts

Playtesting feedback

There are three important pieces of feedback we received from the playtesting.

1. The gameplay is not intuitive enough: it's hard for players to know how to perform actions including typing letters, moving jelly around, and leaving the level. We'll have to add non-verbal tutorials to teach players how to play the game.
2. The difficulty of puzzles is too high. For example, we used the phrase "A journey of _______ miles begins with a single step" and we thought that most of our players know what to fill in. But during the playtest we found few players do, and even if they know, the correct answer (thousand) is too long to type out.
3. The setting is hard to navigate:
   1. The intervals of platforms don't fit the character's physical size, so players can easily get stuck on stairs or bump into other platforms.
   2. Everything in the setting (such as the phrases in the background) is times larger than the player; therefore the player cannot see the entire landscape when they enter a scene. Sometimes players miss important elements in the scene, or they have to run back and forth to read the entire phrase.
   3. We made moving platforms for player's convenience, but it turns out that because of the colliders, the player cannot stand long on the moving platforms, because they'll soon get knocked off by the other platforms.
   4. The ground is too low that once the player drops off the platform, they have to go back to where they started.