The Connections Between Empathy and In-Game Endings
Advisor: Jaymie Silva
Internship Location: Texas A&M University
Onsite Mentor: Mason Smith
For this project, I will be using internet research in the form of video essays or online reviews of relevant games. I will choose four games, two games with alternate endings and two games without. I will compile my thoughts regarding how the ability to interact with the story affected my engagement and will refer to internet resources to assign an overall score on how interactability changed a player's game experience. The end product will be a fully written and planned storyline for an original psychological horror game involving trauma that incorporates my findings. I will then work with Isabelle to create a short 15 - 20 minute long game demo.
Project Blog
Week 1: Introduction
If you're reading this, hi! My name is Cindy Lu (not to be confused with the other Cindy in our grade, or any other Cindy in this school, because there are quite a few of them, I would know), and this is my introductory post for my senior project.
What Is This Project About?
My project title is "The Connections Between Engagement and In-Game Endings." Basically, I'll be reviewing several video games, both some that feature differing endings based on player decision, and some that do not. Using my own experience of these games combined with reviews from other sources, such as video essays and game review websites, I will be scoring each game on a scale of 1 to 3. For games with multiple endings, 1 means that the ability to change the ending negatively impacted the game, 2 means there was no impact from the endings, and 3 means there was a positive impact instead. For games without multiple endings, 1 means that the game was improved by the lack of endings, 2 means there was no impact from the lack of endings, and 3 means the game could have been improved by including differing endings. I would have formatted this better if I could, but this blog doesn't let me insert tables or images so... But essentially, it boils down to 1 = different endings bad, 2 = no impact, and 3 = different endings good.
In the end, using these results, I will be working with Isabelle Eriksson to create a short game demo of a pixel art psychological horror game. I'll be writing the overall storyline as well as every piece of dialogue, while Isabelle is in charge of the art. The overall game follows our protagonist as she ventures through her own dream-like world in order to uncover her past journal entries, which will uncover more about her past and her troubles. She also meets monsters along the way that serve as representations of her own struggles. Based on how she interacts with them, the ending of the game will change. Of course, the short game demo product will not include the differing endings quite yet, but some signs of them will be evident based on character interactions.
If you'd like to learn more about the art section of project, please head over to Isabelle's introductory blog post!
But Why?
I like writing, and I like video games. That's the most simple answer to this question. But let's go into a bit more detail about that.
I'm a writer for this school's Journalism Club (and this is a shameless advert for it, please go read our physical publications and check out our website!). More specifically, I'm also the section editor for the Bunion, which is our satire column, and so what I do is basically story writing. I enjoy reading stories in general, but I am a big fan of story-rich video games. Very specifically, psychological story games exploring a character's dream world are probably my favorite subgenre of these. Combined with Isabelle's love for horror and monsters, and there's our senior project game idea.
Video games are an incredible medium for storytelling that a lot of people seem to not really consider. I intend to use this project as a way to call attention to this. The research section of this project will help indie developers in their development of story-rich games. Ultimately, based on the scoring system explained above, it will become clear whether consumers believe the inclusion of multiple endings will improve or harm the emotional impact provided by these games. And since the story and thus emotional impact is such a fundamentally important part of the story-rich game market, we can gauge what kind of games can end up standing out from a very saturated game market. As such, an indie developer could use the results of this research to aid in the direction of their story, and hopefully earn more profit in a very competitive industry.
Inspiration (An Excuse to Ramble)
The game that offered me the most inspiration for this project is... believe it or not, a short one-hour long mobile game that I'm sure no one knows about. GenEi AP: Empty Heart is a short pixel art game that follows the protagonist, Mikage, as she searches for music discs to offer to her friend Spica, who is searching for a certain song. You navigate Mikage's dream-like world in search for discs to offer to the many ghosts of Spica present throughout the game, and short cutscenes that offer glimpses into what Mikage's life and interactions with Spica are like. Discs can be obtained by exploring certain locations or completely certain tasks, which is something that our game intends to take inspiration from.
This game only offers one ending, and I would have put this on my list of games to review if I could, but there aren't enough reviews of it for me to use. If you're wondering how Isabelle and I found such a niche little game, the story and songs present in the game are based on the works of Vocaloid producer Harumaki Gohan, whose music we are both big fans of. If I tried to explain what a Vocaloid was, this blog would go completely off topic for several long paragraphs, so if you're curious about that, go search it up in your own time. I completely encourage it, by the way.
The other game that comes to mind when talking about inspiration is OMORI, which is a not-so-short pixel art game that follows a lot more triggering topics than GenEi does. It'll be one of the games I will be reviewing for my research segment. Specifically, there's the "hikikomori" route (meaning "shut-in" in Japanese), which is a big deviation from the playthrough present in the rest of the routes. It includes a lot of content that can only be seen in this route, and at the same time drops a lot of content that is present in every other route. And it's all based on one decision made very early on. It's something that will be interesting to focus on for my research.
Progress This Week
The first week of senior project work was last week which... I was getting dragged around at Disneyland for half of. Whoops? But I spent the rest of the week staring a hole into my laptop as Unity refused to cooperate with me on anything.
We spent this first week working on the basic framework of the game, just so we would have at least something to present at the end of our project. As such, Isabelle and I have been working through Unity to have a basic functional prototype of our game. So far, we've implemented player movement and animation, camera movement, and scene transitions. We also got a GitHub repository set up in order to share our work. Most of my time has been spent... learning how Unity functions, since Isabelle has used Unity before and I have not. Coding is hard.
There have been some struggles along the way, but most of them have been resolved already. For instance, I spent a while struggling to implement player animations because certain buttons on the Unity animation tab were greyed out for unknown reasons. However, we found a resolution to that and now player idle and movement animations are working as intended. We've been using premade assets for now, and will be replacing them with our actual assets once Isabelle has completed her own research section of the project.
Up Next
We're going to continue working on getting a working prototype of our game before we begin our research the week after. Some parts we have left to implement are a menu and save file system, as well as object interaction and a dialogue system. Some of this may be left for after we complete our research, though, as we are unsure of how long things like a save file system will take to fully implement.
Come back next week to see even more complaining about Unity!
Week 2: More Unity, More Suffering.
Coding is hard. Unity is complicated. Life is misery.
Progress This Week
I've been working on creating a main menu system this week. So far, we have a (very lame and boring looking) home screen with a "Start Game" button and a "Load Game" button, and the "Start Game" button works. Previously, when the game started, it simply began at whatever scene happened to be open in the editor at the time. However, now the game defaults to the start screen, and upon clicking the "Start Game" button, it loads the first scene. In order to have a functional "Load Game" button, though, we need to create a save state system. It's something that I have been working on, and I have part of it complete. I have finished the scripts for the save system, however so far I have not implemented it into the actual game yet, so the "Load Game" button does not yet work. There also is no "Save Game" button yet. I'll likely have to end up completing this save system after my weeks of research and writing.
Other than that, the player character and the camera no longer move outside of the background area, since colliders have been added to the borders of the levels to prevent them from moving past them. I'm still trying to get used to using Unity, and things are going... slightly better than they were last week in terms of using the actual software? I still have to Google every other thing I do, though.
Also, Isabelle and I went and replayed part of the game that inspired this project, GenEi AP, for possible inspiration on how we could make our game's diary unlock sequences play out. We also brainstormed about possible color themes and game mechanics for the overall game, as well as how to reflect changes due to player choice within the game.
Up Next
Isabelle and I spent the first two weeks towards making the basic framework for a game just to ensure that we would have at least a semi-presentable final product. Starting from Week 3, we will turn to independent research and project work. I start off Week 3 with reviewing OMORI, another game that partially inspired this project.
Week 3: Debugging, with a Side of Panicking Over Github
I spent most of the week working on Unity still. So much for being free of Unity.
Progress This Week: Coding
This week, I spent my time working on overall data storage rather than just the save and load system. I added a way to store whether or not certain encounters have been completed by the player, and also created a score counter based on what are chosen in these encounters. I also made the encounter and score data carry over between different scenes, since usually when Unity moves to a new scene all objects get destroyed by default. Last week, Isabelle created a game manager that prevents other managers from getting destroyed. So, I created a scriptable object for the player data and attached it to the game manager. That way, the data still remains between scene transitions.
And then, the major problem this week. Debugging.
There was a problem with our program, which was that whenever you would go through a scene transition, the spawn point would be saved even after hitting the play button on the Unity interface again. This meant that if you were to leave the first scene and return, the "New Game" button would end up spawning you in at that scene transition point. This also meant that if you closed the game while on the second scene, the player character would just outright disappear when restarting the game. This was because the player would be set to spawn in the second scene, but the first scene that plays when immediately entering the game is the first scene, so the player just would not spawn, softlocking the game.
Isabelle and I sat in a voice call for about two hours trying to fix this. Finally, we were able to get rid of the problem by adding a reset function that activated whenever the "New Game" button was clicked, which would reset the data in several of the scriptable objects attached to the game manager back to their default states. So now, you can't get accidentally softlocked! Yay!
... We also merged branches on Github for the first time and it didn't go as badly as we thought it would. More time was spent panicking about the possibility of messing up than the actual merging. It caused a minor issue, which caused the main character to duplicate, but it was quickly resolved.
Progress This Week: Research
I did not accomplish as much on research as I would have liked. So far, I have reviewed the full gameplay of OMORI in order to refresh my memory on what exactly I should be looking out for in reviews. Due to the nature of multiple endings, namely a good ending, a bad ending, and several variations of the neutral ending, reviews that can be used for my research should make some sort of comment on how these different endings affected gameplay.
I will be scoring each review I find useful by the following scale:
1: the presence of different endings / routes detracts from the experience OR the lack of different endings / routes improves the experience
2: the presence of different endings / routes does not affect anything OR the lack of different endings / routes does not affect anything
3: the presence of different endings / routes improves the experience OR the lack of different endings / routes detracts from the experience
Since OMORI has multiple endings, I will be using the first part of the scale as my criteria. However, so far I have looked through quite a few reviews on Metacritic and have not found many that actually make a comment about the endings, which is probably largely due to how these sort of reviews usually attempt to remain spoiler-free. The reviews I did find that discussed different endings was about the presence of the 'hikikomori route' early on in the game, which can completely alter your gameplay experience based on a simple choice of whether or not to open the door for Kel. So far, the reviews seem to believe that the presence of this alternate route improves the gameplay experience.
Up Next
I plan on focusing more on research in the coming week, and intend to complete my research on OMORI. I have yet to look at Steam reviews, and I hope I will be able to find at least a total of five reviews that discuss my research topic. I will also continue coding, and intend to finish creating a functional save / load system.
Week 4: Meow? (Waiting for Something to Happen?)
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's... OMORI....? ...Wait, something's off.
Progress This Week
This week, I finished my research for OMORI! Yay! I spent so much time this week just scrolling through Steam looking for reviews...
OMORI is an RPG-style psychological horror game created by indie studio Omocat. The story follows Sunny as he explores his town and recalls the events that traumatized him. However, most of the game is set in a dream-like, escapist world known as Headspace, which Sunny's dream alter Omori explores with his friends. There are several main endings, being a good ending, several neutral endings, and a bad ending, with different choices leading up to each of them. The different endings reflect whether Sunny has overcome his trauma, simply ignored it, or let it consume him entirely. In addition, there is also the presence of two main routes, being the True Route and the Hikikomori Route, which depends entirely on a single choice near the very beginning of the game.
Basically, I have been gathering reviews that mention any sort of opinion on how the presence of multiple endings and/or routes affected their gameplay. So far, I have collect 15 different reviews from different sources across the internet, mainly from Steam. This is because Steam has over 60k different reviews of OMORI, which meant that as long as I kept scrolling, I could at least encounter a few reviews that mentioned what I was looking for.
For reminders, here's the scoring system I will be using:
1: the presence of different endings / routes detracts from the experience OR the lack of different endings / routes improves the experience
2: the presence of different endings / routes does not affect anything OR the lack of different endings / routes does not affect anything
3: the presence of different endings / routes improves the experience OR the lack of different endings / routes detracts from the experience
Now, here's some quick fun facts about my results from this week!
- Including my own opinion, I gathered 16 different reviews.
- The ratio of positive to negative reviews used is 15:1, or 93.75% positive. This was in order to attempt to emulate the actual positive review percentage on Steam, which is 97% positive.
- Of all 16 reviews, 10 of them scored a 3 / 3 (meaning that the presence of different endings or routes improved the gameplay experience). Most of the reviews were filled with compliments for how the endings were executed, and how the surprise choices made for rather engaging gameplay.
- Unsurprisingly, the only negative review present scored a 1 / 3. Though, four other reviews that were generally positive scored a 1 / 3 as well.
- The most commonly cited reason for the lowest score was that the game got boring when attempting to clear both of the main routes, as a good portion of content is reused between both paths. In addition, having a choice that affected the game as a surprise is a pain when you pick the wrong option, since you might have to redo a lot of content
- Only one of these reviews scored a 2 / 3. The review specifically mentioned that they were aware of the presence of different endings, however they did not wish to pursue any other ending besides the good ending due to not wanting to see the characters suffer.
- The average score of all reviews is a 2.466667 / 3. This means that on average, people believe that the different endings and routes in OMORI improve their experience with the game.
The attitude that the different options throughout the game improves a person's game experience seems to align with my initial hypothesis. If research continues to support this opinion, then in the game that Isabelle and I are making, we will be including different interaction options that can affect the ending that the player receives.
Besides the research portion, I also have created a functional load menu popup that can be accessed from the main menu. It features three save slots, and they should be functional, however I have not created a save button yet so that can't be tested for right now. I also intend to find a way to make the load menu display extra information, such as when the save was made and where the save was located.
Up Next
Next week, I intend to transition to researching a different game, most likely Library of Ruina (I am going to have so much fun rambling about Ruina). Though, finding reviews for Ruina might be tougher than for OMORI, due to the smaller amount of reviews on Steam. I will also continue working on the save and load system, ideally being able to implement a save button for the game, so I can finally test whether or not the game loading works.
Week 5: May You Find Your Book in This Place.
Progress This Week
This week, I spent my time completing research on Library of Ruina. It was quite a bit more troublesome than OMORI's... I'll discuss that in a bit, though.
Ruina is set in a hypercapitalist hellscape known as the City, where morality has been thrown out the window, violence is the norm, and many struggle to survive another day. Most of the game focuses on a location known as "the Library," run by its AI director, Angela, with help from her freshly kidnapped servant, Roland. Invitations are sent out from the Library to Guests, who may enter the Library and attempt to defeat the Librarians present in order to retrieve books containing whatever knowledge they seek. However, if the Librarians defeat the Guests, the Guests become books instead. Angela's goal is to collect more books to find the ultimate book that will allow her to become a human, and finally free her of her eternal suffering. So as a player, your goal is to control the Librarians to defeat all Guests that come your way.
The different endings present in Ruina only deviate near the very end of the game. Endings depend on a series of two choices made back to back. One choice selection results in either the first bad ending or the second choice, while the second choice selection results in either the second bad ending or the true ending route. In addition, choice selections will cause a warning to appear that says the choice will impact the story ending. However, certain choices will be unavailable unless the player completes several fights required for ending unlocks.
Once again, I have been collecting reviews of this game that mention any sort of impact the presence of different endings had. However, this week I collected far less reviews than I did for OMORI. This is mostly due to several main differences. First off, the choices in Ruina have far less gameplay impact than OMORI's did. Besides the usual choice near the end of the game that impacts the ending, OMORI also has a whole separate hikikomori route, which meant that there were more choice-related aspects to talk about. In addition, Ruina is a less popular game, with about 23k Steam reviews compared to OMORI's 60k. On top of that, OMORI's main appeal is its storyline, and not exactly its gameplay, as many people have complained that the gameplay often becomes a drag. Ruina is essentially the opposite: it is known for its difficult and rage-inducing gameplay, being especially notorious for its "vertical" difficulty spike, which just so happens to be accompanied by an interesting and well-written narrative. As such, there were much more gameplay-centered reviews, and less story-centered ones. All of these factors made my research for this segment a lot harder.
Now that the explaining is out of the way, I will be listing off statistics from my research this week.
- Including my own opinion, I gathered five different reviews. Quite a big drop from last week's count.
- Due to the limited number of reviews actually discussing the endings, I was unable to recreate the ratio of positive to negative reviews. The overall percentage of positive reviews is 93%, while the percentage of positive reviews I gathered was just 100%.
- Out of all reviews, two of them scored a 3 / 3. They discussed how getting multiple endings isn't much of a struggle, and only really needs the redo of one major fight if you fulfilled all the other requirements beforehand.
- Two reviews scored a 2 / 3. One review once again citing an attachment to the characters and not wanting to see them in a bad ending. This was a factor that I had not assumed would be prevalent before starting my senior project, so seeing it appear twice already is rather interesting.
- The second review scoring 2 / 3 talked about how all endings could be unlocked by unlocking the true ending via a cutscene replay function, and thus there would be no point in going back and completing the endings in actual gameplay.
- One review scored a 1 / 3, stating that the bad endings basically just threw away all character development that had happened to Angela and Roland throughout the course of the game.
- The average score of all reviews is a 2.2 / 3. This means that on average, people believe that the different endings in Ruina did not impact their experience with the game much.
Although OMORI's results generally showed that the endings and routes present did help improve gameplay experience, Ruina's results were more neutral, although it does slightly lean towards helping. These findings do make some sense considering that Ruina's endings did offer less changes than OMORI's different endings and routes did. So far, my research seems to show that having more parts of gameplay altered by player choices do lead to more engagement from the player, which does still sort of match my initial hypothesis.
Other than that, I did a bit more work with saving and loading, though there are still errors I haven't fixed yet. This will largely be put on hold starting next week in order to prioritize actual gameplay mechanics, though.
Up Next Week
Next week, I'll probably start doing research on To The Moon. I will also be working on coding systems more involved in the actual gameplay mechanics themselves, such as object interactions. I'll explain how they are meant to tie into gameplay as I work on them throughout the following weeks.
Week 6: Why is Everything Falling Apart
The Problem
So.... I realized a flaw in my research, a little too late.
See, originally I planned to complete my research using four total games, two with different endings and two without. And that was going fine until last week, but then things just got a lot harder this week.
This is something I probably should have noticed earlier, but the games without different endings have a different theme than the ones with different endings. If you've been reading my blogs on Ruina and OMORI, you'd have noticed that both of them carry a similar central theme: coming to terms with whatever happened in the past and being able to move on from it. Because of this, it makes sense that they had different endings. You either succumbed to the past or were able to move on, which is why there were good and bad endings. In OMORI, Sunny would either acknowledge his traumatic experience and tell his friends about it, or he'd succumb to OMORI and leave his life behind. In Ruina, Angela and Roland both had to choose to let go of their revenge in order to reach a happy ending, otherwise one of them would end up dead by the hands of the other.
But thematically, the other two games without different endings are sort of different. Both of the games I was going to review for this segment, To The Moon and Spiritfarer, have a common point: they also discuss moving on from the past, but instead of having individuals actively choosing to move on, it centers around resolving the regrets of the dead. In this scenario, having different endings doesn't even make sense. The dead are not the ones making the choices, since they are unable to interact with the world; instead, it is a proxy of sorts resolving their past for them. In that case, these regrets are something that *must* be resolved, rather than something that only *can* be resolved. I probably should have specified more about the specific themes of the games I wanted to review when preparing for research, but it's a little too late now. Also, this doesn't even cover how hard it is to find opinions on the inclusion of different endings in games without multiple of them (believe me, I tried).
I might either find a game with similar themes as the previous two to continue my research on next week, or I'll just post my research conclusions in my next blog post. We'll see.
Game Mechanics
Now with that out of the way, I can finally talk about what our game will have. Basically, the game will center around our protagonist Raven as she explores a dream-like world in her own mind and remembers memories that she tried to suppress. As the player explores the world as Raven, more hints and details about her should be uncovered. How we plan on going about that is via a journal entry unlock system. By interacting with things present in the dream world, different journal entries written by Raven in the past will be unlocked. These will range from simply picking up certain objects in the overworld to entering different areas with conditions fulfilled to pseudo-combat encounters with different monsters that originate from Raven's insecurities. Which journal entries are unlocked will alter the course of the story, as my research so far has shown that people do find storyline changes due to choices more engaging. As such, I've started working on implementing some of these mechanics into the game so far.
Progress This Week
Besides the whole... research disaster thing, I mainly spent my time working on coding journal unlocks. First off, I had to create a journal menu itself, which involved some messing with UI. Then, since Isabelle already got a dialogue system working, I modified some code to make it so that once a dialogue option is chosen, it unlocks the journal entry, which then reflects on the journal menu. I also had to rework some of the data storage system for this, as I had previously written a bunch of methods made for modifying a data storage object attached to a game manager, but it was impossible for them to work since it had no connection to the actual data storage. This was a dilemma that I spent a while trying to solve... only to find out that moving the methods to a different class was all it took. The pain.
Also, because the data storage values are updated after choosing the dialogue option in question, now the barrier that the dialogue option unlocks stays removed even after leaving and returning to the scene where it is located. In addition, since Isabelle finished the starting cutscene, it now actually shows up when you click on the "New Game" button on the main menu, rather than teleporting you directly into a game stage.
Up Next Week
I talked about how we now have stored the data of whether or not a dialogue option has been chosen, which means that even after leaving a scene the game still remembers the option you chose in that scene. However, as of right now, it only stores whether or not the correct dialogue option was chosen, and not which dialogue option was chosen, which is something I plan on changing. For that, I'll have to look into using C# methods in Ink, which is the dialogue system we are using for the project.
I also plan on expanding the journal menu, as it currently only displays two pages of the journal as a base. I want to implement an option to flip pages in the journal and move to display other entries besides only two.
Week 7: Unity. More Unity.
A Short Video Showcase
Kind of took a break from research and stuff due to last week's fiasco, haha. Mainly spent this week wrangling Unity (again).
Before I get into anything, in celebration of this infuriating website FINALLY supporting media uploads after six whole weeks of nothing, here's a short showcase video of what's in the game so far. For the record, 90% of the things you see are placeholder graphics that we are currently using, since Isabelle is still working on the art and designs. The only non-placeholder part of this whole thing is the starting cutscene. The UI and menu are also very barebones for simplicity's sake right now, and the title is still just a placeholder as well. However, since the basic functionalities are there in the game already, we can just replace the sprites and artwork once Isabelle's done with them.
Video: https://www.datocms-assets.com/221631/1790629625-2024-04-12-14-17-21-1.mp4
Since everything went by rather quickly, I'll explain a bit of what happens. First off, there's a cutscene that triggers upon clicking "Begin New Entry" (aka "Start Game"), accompanied by some placeholder text. After that, the game transitions into the main playable area in the game, where many of the main processes can be seen at work.
First, you'll notice that there's a Data Store object in the Inspector tab. This is a scriptable object that stores player data, making sure that it retains between scenes. Otherwise, the moment the scene is changed, all the data would be reset. The reason Data Store does not reset in our case is because it is attached to the Game Manager that remains throughout every single scene, and can be seen under the Hierarchy tab. You can see that after the game changes scenes from the main room to the jungle room, the Score value and the Encounters list remain the same.
Upon correctly interacting with the NPC present in the room, Element 0 of the Encounters list in Data Store changes from a value of 0 to 3. This is in order to signify that the player has completed a certain interaction in a certain way, with the index signifying which encounter was completed and the value signifying how the encounter was completed (different choices means different values!). After this interaction, the parts of the game locked behind that specific interaction become available. In this example scenario, those parts are Journal #1 and the barrier preventing the player from accessing the next room. As you can see, after the interaction, Journal #1's text changes, and the barrier disappears.
Currently, the "Load Game" button does not work, as I have not completed the save / load system and will likely not be doing so for a while since it's not really a high priority. All text is placeholder text because I'm still working on writing out dialogue and such. We've also tried to fix the flashing choices box present in all dialogue, but neither of us could figure the cause so... that's a problem for future us, I guess.
Progress This Week
With the video out of the way, let's talk about this week's progress. I spent most of the week reworking how the journal system works. First off, I added two buttons for flipping pages that can be seen on the bottom parts of the journal. I also specifically created a function that checks if the buttons should appear, and so the buttons will disappear if you cannot flip any more pages in a certain direction just to make things less confusing.
Also, prior to this week, the journal only consisted of two pages, and so journal updates could simply be done by changing the text present on a certain page without any conditions attached. However, in order to support page flipping, I had to change it so that there is a value that checks which page you are on, and as such only updates the text box for a page if the player is on the correct page.
In addition, to avoid saving long journal entries under Data Store, I created a text file that the game reads from in order to collect unlocked journal entries. Basically, each line of the text file represents one journal entry. As such, each line is placed into an array so that the index will correspond with which journal it is. The reason I chose to work with a text file is because if I stored all of the values in an array only, the array would be reset every time a scene changed. Also, I did not want to attach such an array to Data Store, since that would be repetitive due to it already storing the Encounters list. Currently, the text file also consists of placeholder text, but since the system itself works I can simply change the text when I need to.
Up Next Week
Next week, I'll work on my research again. Since gathering opinions on whether or not a game should have different endings is... rather difficult when the game only has one ending, I will be looking into another game that discusses trauma and moving on, but with multiple endings, like my first two did. Other than that, I will probably also work on writing some dialogue for the actual game, and will probably replace the placeholder cutscene text with what we actually plan to have in the game. I will also see if I can implement using C# methods in Ink, which is what we are using for our dialogue system.
Week 8: Once Haunted, Can a Place Be Unhaunted?
Progress This Week
Before I get talking about coding and all that good stuff, we have more research results to cover this week. This week, the game I opted to research was Night in the Woods.
Night in the Woods follows 20 year old college dropout Mae, who has returned to her hometown of Possum Springs and is trying to reconnect with her past as she wanders the area, whether that be via talking with her neighbors, hanging out with her friends, and uncovering strange cult activity in the area. This one is similar to previous games I've researched, in that there are some effects of interaction on the game. However, the fundamental ending of Night in the Woods does not change, and making choices only alters some dialogue present at the end of the game. There are also some dialogue options to choose from when talking to other characters. But more than that, some choices lead to different events on different days, and choosing one over another locks you out of the other one in the same gameplay file. In that sense, the focus is different as the choices do not alter the ending much, but instead alters the gameplay path.
Before I show the results, I'll leave my scoring system here again, since it's been a few weeks since I've talked about research.
1: the presence of different endings / routes detracts from the experience
2: the presence of different endings / routes does not affect anything
3: the presence of different endings / routes improves the experience
And now, here's a fact breakdown for my research results!
- Including my own opinion, I gathered a total of 11 different reviews.
- The ratio of positive to negative reviews is 9:1, or 90%. This was in order to emulate the actual percentage of positive reviews on Steam, which is 94%.
- You'll note that there's one review missing from the above ratio. That's because the review had more of a neutral opinion. To quote the reviewer himself, "At one point I was sure I was going to write about how much I disliked Night In The Woods. At a later point I realised I was going to write about how much I loved Night In The Woods. I think there’s a lot to know about Night In The Woods from that. It is both extraordinary and wanting, fantastic and frustrating." The review does mention both positive points and negative points to the game, but those mainly balance each other out into a more neutral opinion overall.
- Out of all 11 reviews, six of them scored a 3 / 3. Some of the most common points mentioned were that due to the fact that the game locks you out of certain encounters due to the choices the player makes, this makes the game more replayable and therefore makes the presence of different options more interesting. Many times, the dialogue options Mae has were also mentioned, and the reviews do note that these dialogue options were interesting and made the game more enjoyable.
- Four reviews scored a 1 / 3. Most of them mentioned that even though there are different choices that call for multiple playthroughs, the changes present are very minor and thus do not make multiple playthroughs actually interesting. In addition, there is plenty of side content that can be missed due to this. Another review mentioned that the dialogue choices in this game have too little interaction, and it feels more like watching events just play out on their own rather than actually playing a game.
- One review scored a 2 / 3. This was because the review noted that despite the presence of dialogue options many times throughout the game, these dialogue options actually seem more like an illusion of choice, since nothing really changes. In addition, there are some dialogue choices where there genuinely is no actual "choice," since the options all restate the same sentence in different ways. As such, the dialogue options do not have much impact on the actual game.
- The average score of all reviews is a 2.181818182 / 3. This means that people do believe that the player choices in this game do improve the gameplay experience, but not by that much. This does make sense, as the options present here are very lowkey and do not actually impact the game as much as it does for a game such as OMORI. It also does score slightly lower than Library of Ruina, but not by much.
I'll have a final research summary coming up next week, so stay tuned for that.
Besides the whole research thing, I spent a lot of this week messing with Ink, which is an external software we are using for our dialogue system. Due to this, I was able to add more conditionals to the dialogue we had for our NPC, which means that the NPC has a lot more possible lines now, just to make things a little more interesting. I also worked on implementing a way to call C# functions from within Ink, which makes using Ink quite a bit more convenient.
Up Next
Next week I'll probably just spend more time in Unity, haha... Specifically, I plan to work on the battle UI for our game. Since there are monster encounters in this game, there has to be a specific battle-like scene where the player faces them. In addition, we will be adding some actual artwork to the game to replace our placeholder art, so that's exciting. Other than that, I also will be adding a final research summary, like I mentioned above.
Week 9: Birb? Birb.
Research Results
So now that I have three games worth of data, here's a whole summary of everything as well as a few conclusions.
- OMORI featured two main routes based on a decision made at the start of the game, as well as multiple endings due to choices near the end of the game. It scored a 2.466667 / 3, with most people praising the different routes and endings for being engaging.
- Library of Ruina featured a series of two choices at the end, where answering both choices in a certain way unlocks a series of fights that leads to the true ending. However, by unlocking the true ending, the cutscenes for the other endings can also be viewed in a cutscene viewer. It scored a 2.2 / 3. However, this one is probably the most questionable score, because I was only able to collect a few reviews for this game that actually discussed the endings.
- Night in the Woods featured many dialogue choices that did not have an impact on the game's overall story, as well as a choice of who to hang out with that affects dialogue at the end of the game. It scored a 2.1818182 / 3, with most people mentioning the fact that the different choices present make the game rather replayable and the dialogue choices are interesting.
From these results, it seems that the more interactions that affect the ending, the higher the score. OMORI has by far the most interactions that affect the ending, and has a higher score than both of the other games by 0.3. Ruina and Night in the Woods have a similar amount of interactions that affect the ending, and they scored a similar score. However, Ruina scored slightly higher, though whether or not Ruina's score is actually accurate is mildly debatable.
It seems that what people enjoy the most is seeing a game that has many interactions that affect the ending of the game, while also being replayable due to different content being locked behind certain other playthroughs. As such, our game will feature different interactions that all affect the ending, based on how you interact with monsters and how many journal entries you collect.
Progress This Week
Speaking of journal entries, I spent most of my time planning dialogue and journal entries. Basically, how game progression will work is that by interacting with certain objects, Raven can unlock different journal entries, which talk about her past experiences. I've basically just been writing out what should appear for these journals, and also planning out dialogue between Raven and her bird companion Poe. Please check Isabelle's blog for Poe, who is the most adorable little bean in existence and I love him with all my heart. He's just a lil birb guy. Except he has a horrible attitude but that's fine because it's funny.
Other than that, I've also been working on implementing a battle system. So what we've decided is to go with a system where the monster has an internal value that changes based on the player's responses. If the player makes good responses, the value decreases, and if the player makes bad responses, the value increases. There is a cap on either side of the value, where reaching this value signifies the battle end. Depending on which cap is reached, though, the outcomes of the battle will differ. Since our battle system is somewhat similar to our dialogue system, I should be able to create a UI for it and implement its functions next week.
Up Next Week
I'll probably continue writing and planning dialogue, but I'll also spend time implementing our battle system. I'll try my best to finish the battle system up next week, just so we have more time for random touch-ups and actual story implementation.
Week 10: Face the Void, Save the... Wait, What?
Progress This Week
This week was mainly a battle system and writing week. To start off, here's a short video demo of what the battle system looks like right now!
Video: https://www.datocms-assets.com/221631/1790629629-2024-05-03-13-51-36.mp4
As you can see, the battle system is pretty similar to our pre-existing dialogue system. I took the dialogue system and made a few changes, such as changing the choices setup within the code and implementing a turn counter, but other than that it's mostly the same. The choices panel UI is also different, as you can see in the video. Also, this battle encounter was written for testing purposes, and is acting as a placeholder for the actual battle text that will be present in the final game.
Other than the battle system, I did some more writing. I mainly worked on planning out which items would be interactable for unlocking journals, and writing out journals themselves. I'll keep working on that, and hopefully we can put actual dialogue on the game soon!
Up Next Week
More dialogue writing, definitely. Also probably a few more battle UI updates. I'll most likely be adding a journal open function for the battle screen, and might also work on creating an item list for the battle as well. I will also work on adding a line on dialogue boxes that indicate the speaker.
Week 11: The Word "Tasty" No Longer Looks Like A Word To Me.
Progress This Week
This week was mainly a coding break because wow I am so tired of everything not working. Mainly just dialogue and battle planning.
Basically, since Isabelle is busy wrangling to get cutscenes to work (RIP) and there isn't that much coding stuff to do besides a bit of UI and I guess adding names to dialogue panels (which I will get to by the way) I have basically just been writing. I have about half of the game planned out, and I originally planned to finish it all this week but battle planning ended up taking a lot longer than I expected. Having to write out three separate choice dialogues (technically four) for each turn is tiring... At least it means that I get to write funny dialogue lines. Did you know that in this game you can attempt to name a monster you meet, with incredibly riveting name choices like "Big Birb" and "Sir William Gray the 122nd" and (potentially) "Casserole?" And you get to see Raven being super annoyed with Poe and the two of them telling each other to shut up. Also regarding the monster you meet, he speaks in weird capitalizations and talks about how lonely people are tasty. I wrote the word "tasty" more times this week than I have in the past month and now I swear it doesn't even look like a word anymore.
Up Next Week
Yeah. More dialogue. I'll definitely finish planning everything and will start working on implementing everything onto Unity. Most of the work has already been done, so I mostly just paste what I've written into the correct places and add a few functions and conditionals here and there and pray everything works. Yay.