{"id":1525,"date":"2015-03-21T11:38:20","date_gmt":"2015-03-21T10:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/?p=1525"},"modified":"2015-03-23T06:17:28","modified_gmt":"2015-03-23T05:17:28","slug":"afoh-designvalidation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/afoh-designvalidation\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog: AFoH Design Principles Validation"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while ago we published our twelve so-called “Design Principles<\/a>“. In a perfect world, a perfectly crafted game would fulfill every single one of these principle, but when we produced “A Fragment of Her<\/a>” for the Point & Click Jam 2014<\/a>, there were several constraints which prevented us from fulfilling all of them. Let’s check and see which principles were fulfilled and which were not. Have fun \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

1 \u2013 RESPECT THE GAME.<\/strong>
\nAFoH is mostly reading texts, clicking on a couple of obvious things, and reading texts again. Because not much “game” made it into the title, we called it an “Interactive Short Story” instead.
\nVerdict: Failed.<\/span><\/p>\n

2 \u2013 CUT THE CUTSCENE.<\/strong>
\nAFoH is basically one big cutscene with loads of texts, connected by some light interactive elements.
\nVerdict: Failed.<\/span><\/p>\n

3 \u2013 DON\u2019T TAKE CONTROL AWAY.<\/strong>
\nControl is constantly taken away from the player. Most of the time the player character even walks around and leaves the scenes on her own.
\nVerdict: Failed.<\/span><\/p>\n

4 \u2013 GRANT QUICK ACCESS.<\/strong>
\nAFoH has no classical title screen and the game starts instantly after clicking “START”. There’s even a web-demo where interested players can test the game withouth having to install it. On the other hand, there’s no save and load options, so players who quit in halfway through have to start over.
\nVerdict: Passed. (More or less)<\/span><\/p>\n

5 \u2013 FUN IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ART.<\/strong>
\nWe tried to make a fun, short, interesting, and also a bit demanding experience, but it wasn’t our goal to create an artistic masterpiece the academics would still talk about in years to come.
\nVerdict: Passed<\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n

6 \u2013 FUN IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN CHALLENGE.<\/strong>
\nTelling a story straight forward was more important to us than challenging the player with tricky puzzles.
\nVerdict: Passed<\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n

7 \u2013 CHALLENGE IS OPTIONAL.<\/strong>
\nThe only challenge in AFoH is to get as many information about the game world as possible. Going back to Selina’s department more often than necessary to examine everything can be considered as optional.
\nVerdict: Passed<\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n

8 \u2013 DON\u2019T PUNISH.<\/strong>
\nThere’s no fail state and the player can’t do anything wrong. For the few easy puzzles in the game, we tried to give as many hints as possible.
\nVerdict: Passed<\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n

9 \u2013 DON\u2019T LOCK THE PLAYER.<\/strong>
\nIn AFoH, the player is locked all the time, she has to read a lot of texts and she has to solve the (easy) puzzles in an strictly pre-defined order.
\nVerdict: Failed.<\/span><\/p>\n

10 \u2013 BE SHORT, BE FUN.<\/strong>
\nAFoH is very short and players seem to like it.
\nVerdict: Passed<\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n

11 \u2013 GAME ENDING FIRST.<\/strong>
\nRight from the start of the production, how the game whould end was very important to us.
\nVerdict: Passed<\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n

12 \u2013 SOUND. USE THE POTENTIAL.<\/strong>
\nWe tried to achieve the right balance between athmospheric, quiet sequences, and dramatic sequences accompanied by leitmotifs. We also created and used many sounds, some of them have even several different variations.
\nVerdict: Passed<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while ago we published our twelve so-called “Design Principles“. In a perfect world, a perfectly crafted game would fulfill every single one of these principle, but when we produced “A Fragment of Her” for the Point & Click Jam 2014, there were several constraints which prevented us from fulfilling all of them. Let’s check […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-1525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-blog-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1525"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1539,"href":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525\/revisions\/1539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chronerion.com\/interactive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}