Fictional worlds & game mechanics
My experience in week two
The source material this week was split over the design of fictional worlds and game mechanics.
The Narrative Design video by Che Wilbraham introduced us to the term ‘Interactive Narrative’ and explained the design of this being to create a possible space (Story World) in which a player can act to create their own experience (Storyline). The video went on to outline the difference between Embedded and Emergent Narrative and how these terms relate to Interactive Narrative in that the Story World is formed of Embedded Narrative and the Emergent Narrative is tied more to the Storyline that the player creates. I found this to be very inspiring and above anything the video instilled the importance of narrative behind gameplay and creating stickiness within apps and games.
The Role Playing Games video by Che Wilbraham took us through the different parts and mechanics behind a Role Player Game (RPG). First there was a run through of the character representation, challenge representation and conflict resolution and some hint at how this can be achieved by assigning attributes to each of the game sprites to determine their properties. Next there was a run through of the setting, flavour, complexity and players with a description of each part, followed by a short piece titled Why do you want to make a game? which is focused on the drivers behind the idea of the game and ensuring it is meaningful. Next there was a slide on how to bring everything together to ensure that all parts of the system fit with the story, a slide on the importance of getting inspiration through research, and finally a slide on what Che Wilbraham terms as Play Test that is an expansion on the iterative approach to design, prototyping and evaluation mentioned in this post with more emphasis on the feedback loop and how this can be used to improve the game.
Tying this to my project
Despite itching to throw myself into the development of Escape The App, I had planned to finish the app’s business plan by the start of February so that I could begin pitching for investment by the middle or the end of the month. Despite being behind in achieving this SMART goal, I also acknowledge that the development required to bring the app to MVP release over the next eleven weeks (another of my SMART actions) is no mean feat in itself so to progress both I decided to split my production work this week 50/50 with aim to work both on the business plan and on the UX and design of some key screens.
I began the design of the Account, List Games and Play Game screens based on my UX sketches created over the Christmas break and initially I was pretty pleased with the results. However, this was before watching the Narrative Design and Role Playing Games videos by Che Wilbraham, after this the app felt as though it was missing narrative completely and this was reflected in the graphics which now appeared to lack substance and what I needed to do first was to create a narrative and then bring everything together to ensure all parts of the journey fit with the story. I started thinking about the ‘Escape Game Owner’ user and the ‘Escape Game Player’ user. Who were they? What was their purpose within the app and why would they use it? I started looking at Zombies Run, an app that got mention during the last study block as a good example of a gamification app. I looked at the way they embed the narrative and how this plays a part within the apps stickiness. I spent a few hours brainstorming an overarching narrative for Escape The App and this is what I came up with:
In 2012 real world social interactions were dying. Millennials were increasingly turning to their devices to socialise and play virtual games. Statistics showed that by 2021 all offline social interactions will have become extinct. As a last resort world governments formed a top secret underground movement to encourage offline social interactions through exciting Escape Games. This movement was known as Escape. By 2018 the Escape movement is proven to be working, offline social interactions have increased by 1000% but economical factors are forcing a clamp down on funding and yet again the survival of real world social interactions hangs in the balance. With no funding behind the Escape movement the fate of real world social interactions and Escape Gaming is now in the hands of the people. We are Escape, we are the revolution and we need you.
I then updated the designs to lend themselves more to the narrative and created a task to look more closely at the messaging and the mechanics within the Play Game journey to see where I can better embed the narrative and consider the potential for emergent narrative to make the experience of playing an Escape Game more sticky.
The narrative learning also bled into my work on the business plan and enabled me to rethink the section titled ‘How Escape The App Works’. I embedded the above narrative into this to make the content more engaging and I ran over the entire plan to introduce the narrative throughout and bring more cohesion to the plan.
Aside from the introduction of the narrative to the plan I also tackled three of the five missing sections including the marketing strategy, investment proposal and the product comparison. The Why do you want to make a game? section in the Role Playing Games video was helpful in driving the marketing strategy. The video emphasises the importance of clearly defining the Why and then how maintaining this high level vision of this goal when working on the tiny details will bring more cohesion and ensure everything is pulling in the same direction. The Why for me being to bring gamification to the play of escape games. This being a demand of the Escape Game Enthusiast drove me to look first at these early adopters and focus my growth strategy around them.
Moving on from the marketing strategy, I found the investment proposal work quite taxing as I struggled to calculate an encouraging Return On Investment (ROI). This enforced a conclusion that despite being a good business, Escape The App is not an incredibly investable venture with only it’s current monetisation strategy of selling subscriptions and advertisements to Escape Businesses. Feeling a tad deflated by this I decided to put the work to one side and focus on finding a product comparison. This was something I had expected to be tough as the app is quite unique in that it is gamification of a game, I wasn’t wrong, despite looking at companion apps to board games, companion apps to computer games and exploring various other avenues, I hit a brick wall trying to find something that was similar enough to be deemed a good comparator. Just before giving in I changed tact and started thinking of other competitive activities that have a thriving community and this eventually led me to Go-Karting and RaceFacer. After four hours of research, this was a welcome find, I was encouraged to find something that aligned so well, and being well established and feature rich it was also inspiring to see what Escape The App could become and gave me a hint toward bookings as a potential solution for improving monetisation and increasing the ROI. I created myself a task to investigate taking bookings and another task to look more at RaceFacer and get the required metrics such as historic downloads, active users and revenue for the business plan.
Summary
In this post I’ve briefly summarised the content in the source material on Canvas for the week and I’ve gone on to outline my experience based on this. Most notably I’ve talked about the inspiration I’ve taken from the learning about narrative and how this has highlighted where my current design of Escape The App was lacking and encouraged me to create some tasks on my project board to improve this. Finally I’ve talked about how both the Narrative Design video and Role Playing Games video, in particular the content focused on Why do you want to make a game? have enabled me to improve the business plan.