Play the game here! https://m-ansley.itch.io/piece-by-piece
Full Walkthrough: https://twitter.com/i/status/1224064219773132801
Experience Digest:
Overview
A couple weeks ago I took part in the Global Game Jam. While we hadn’t initially intended to, three coursemates and myself ended up forming a team to address the jam’s fairly open theme of ‘repair’. It turned out to be one of the most positive, constructive work environments I’ve ever been a part of. To summarise it, the jam consisted of a lot of collaborative design, democratic decisions, and a great understanding of each other’s abilities and strengths. I don’t doubt life in the industry, particularly the AAA industry, is a lot more hierarchical than this, but it honestly gave me a glimmer of what small-scale game development could be like.
We had a relaxed couple of hours of ideation on the first day, putting out ideas and loose thoughts around the jam’s theme, and thinking through some game ideas more specifically. I thought it was a bit of a silly suggestion, but I shared an idea of a little game where the player controls a robotic character that falls apart as the game progresses, needing to repair himself with sometimes makeshift prostheses. The avatar would most likely reach a familiar character at the end of the game, but having changed so much that the character can no longer recognise him. It has its problems, namely the sheer number of assets we’d need our artist to create if we were working in a 2D environment (and the potentially fiddly programming on the various components that fall off the avatar), but it does ask a pretty focused and hopefully evocative question: To what extent are we the same person after the self-repair we conduct? It’s essentially the Ship of Theseus thought-experiment turned into a platformer. The team seemed surprisingly on board with the idea, but in all honesty I wasn’t. Aside from the practical problems I thought we might have, I repeatedly voiced that I’d much rather us try to make something beautiful rather than quirky. Yes, quirky is often the word we might use to describe game jam games, particularly some of the most successful ones, but our team consisted of designers from a course that urges us to create meaningful experiences. To tell stories, to evoke emotions.
I urged us to take a step back, perhaps aim at something functionally simpler but more meaningful. I suspected this particular theme was really resonating with some of us, and that we might have a particular story to tell. After speaking to her, it sounded like Martha had a set of ideas about emotional repair drawn from personal experience. She explained the kind of story she had, and it sounded beautiful. My only concern was that we didn’t risk rushing this or ruining what she had to tell; it can be quite painful to put so much of yourself into something that doesn’t turn out well. We developed this idea, thinking of how we might root it in something tangible. We ended up settling with a single, personally-significant object the player repairs while working through a kind of emotional repair. Furthermore, we decided the object would be significant not so much because of the function it served or who owned it, but because of its emotional value after a particular incident (its connection, in this case, with one of the last arguments a brother and sister had with each other).
As such, ‘Piece by Piece’ is a game about trying to restore something from the past and come to terms with loss. It’s about emotional self-repair mapped onto an act of physical repair. The game often gets misread for being a puzzle game when in actuality its a narrative one. There are not piece rotation mechanics and there are only seven pieces in total. It’s a short, meditative piece that urges the player to slow down, take in a story, and reflect.
Work
It felt a little strange and arbitrary at the end of the piece to give ourselves certain titles for the credits. Certainly, we all did the things we described in the credits, but as you might notice there’s no lead ‘designer’. We have UI design and environmental design as specific branches (the latter being one of my roles), but this really was a piece of collaborative, democratic design.
To get practical, my main work was in getting the raycasting system to work for the drag mechanic. This allowed us to move the pieces across a surface rather than relative to the screen, meaning we had greater freedom to position the player camera (rather than strictly top-down). I also implemented the audio manager to integrate our sound designer’s music and royalty-free sound effects into the game (a satisfying ‘click’ being really important to us in terms of game feel for this piece). I also helped our main programmer implement a tried and tested dialogue system into our game, essentially the Brackeys Dialogue Manager with some variations of our own. The project manager and I often have our disagreements over timing — she prefers fast, I prefer ‘steady’ — and to me scrolling dialogue text seriously needs the kinds of pauses we find in human speech. I insisted this would be easy to implement — we just needed to create a couple if statements that check for the pieces of punctuation in question before creating a longer delay within the for loop (for printing out the character array).
With these additions, we were in a much better position to think about the overall feel, pace, and presentation of our piece — what feedback does the player get when they do this? How much time should we give them to read something? Additionally, after we went away on one of the evenings I continued work on the project to implement a little touch I really felt people would appreciate. I just wanted it so after the player clicks on the lamp and makes the title disappear the camera would lean in to begin their work. It’s a little touch, and fairly simple to implement using the Unity Animator and couple scripts, but for me it just gives the player this brief establishing shot, if only to tell them that a world exists around them (and that this repair is actually situated somewhere). I also felt tangibility and a degree of embodiment would be really beneficial to our piece (our act of repair being so tactile/physical), and this it would make the game feel a bit more dynamic and three-dimensional. Admittedly, it also worked as a compromise — I wanted a more detailed surrounding environment but at the same time appreciated we didn’t want a ‘cluttered’ look. Sure, we’d use lighting to tell the player what’s important, but this would allow us to show that there’s more in the scene than what the player strictly needs.
Earlier in the project, I sketched and proposed several environments to the rest of the team, including a study, kitchen, living room, and dining room. The kitchen or dining room might have allowed us to have an ever-present empty chair in the background, while the living room might give us a sense of warmth and home. But ultimately, we all settled on the study, creating this sense of the player-character having actively decided to take time out of their day to commit to this task. It’s a place for focus and a degree of intimacy with the object in question. The aforementioned animation would work to complement this sense of focus or study — the object as artifact — and the team were very pleased with the end result of this effect.
On a similar note, I also spent my time making a few decorative objects to have at our disposal — pencils, scrunched paper, glue, a pencil pot, a cork board. I also made the desk-lamp and switch, wired/coded them up, and made extensive use of freepbr textures throughout the project (freepbr.com). We were going for something fairly minimalist, but it still felt important to ensure the objects that were in our scene had a consistent style and build to them.
Lastly, I made the thumbnail/cover art, description, and submission page. My emphasis for this project was on thinking as much as I could about presentation and feel, both via the tools in the Unity Editor and via C# scripts. Our game was well within scope, meaning we did what we could to create something consistent and complete for the player to enjoy.
