Game Designer
Cures & Curios
Between 2016 and 2018 I was fortunate enough to work with a wonderful group of individuals on Cures & Curios, a Vive potion crafting experience set in an alternative old west.
Coming into junior year the team played various Vive games to get a handle on the platform. We first established that we wanted to place an emphasis on utilizing the physical space which separated the Vive from other gaming platforms of the time. Our next major decision was to eschew voiceover, as our audio lead had previously worked on AAA titles and didn’t feel that we would find the quality of voice acting we desired in such a small school. Finally, we wanted to keep the game as diegetic as possible without sacrificing clarity to create an immersive VR experience. These three decisions heavily colored the way in which the game was developed. I initially shared a creative director role though I eventually shifted my focus to UX/UR on the second year of the project.
​
Crafting Design
In our first year we simply wanted to make an immersive VR experience. Rather than placing a strong emphasis on a more traditional game design we wanted to make a core loop which yielded new enjoyable interactions which complimented the medium. We attempted to implement this by having players craft potions to earn rewards such as minigames and interactive objects like slingshots, similar to the gameplay of Job Simulator. We fell short in elaborating on this formula on two fronts: our crafting system relied far too much on player memorization and we didn’t have enough bandwidth to create multiple high-quality reward interactions. As the video below shows, the player constantly needed to reference a spellbook in order to make potions.
A Prototype for the New Crafting System
To rectify this issue, our audio engineer Greg Hall suggested changing our AI to order recipes consisting of ingredients that would have properties that players could intuit. In this system, customers would request a potion consisting of three properties: a texture, a flavor, and an effect. I prototyped this system in Google Sheets (with help from Clark Meyer) to test various request types and ingredient names to gather data on players’ success rates in guessing ingredient properties. This allowed us to quickly iterate on this system while a more concrete version was built in-engine by Greg. The tool provides the user a three-word order which the player must fulfill by selecting from a list of ingredient options. The resulting data allowed us to assess whether it was ingredients or properties (ex. Bitter, sour) which confused players.
Ensuring Clarity
Once we changed ingredients and properties which players had difficulty intuiting, we worked on closing the core loop of the game. We tested weekly or bi-weekly depending on availability. We found that testers either instantly intuited our system or were completely unable to play the game. Once we told them to associate an ingredient with a property, most players were able to enjoy the game. With this in mind, I prototyped our tutorial system. Without plans for voice over at this juncture, I decided to use darkness and spotlights to guide the players' eyes. Players would step through each ingredient in the potion and were aware that there were three ingredients for every potion. Eric Deters and Riley O'Dea then added a second ingredient so players could learn via comparison to associate properties with the request.