For the first two week round of my Building Virtual Worlds class at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, our assignment was to build an interface to complete a task. The three tasks my group of five had to choose from were “Treat a Wound," "Make a Bowl of Ramen," and "Give a Tattoo," from which we chose "Treat a Wound.”
Since I have an interest in herbal medicine making, we chose to interpret “Treat a Wound” in an herbal way. We created a post-apocalyptic world in which the player treats several whimsical fantasy creatures.
We were given an Xbox Adaptive Controller kit with which to build our interface. We wanted our players to feel like they were actually going through the physical actions of making herbal medicine, so we made a knife and chopping board, mortar and pestle, and cauldron bellows.
The knife was carved from wood, with a button embedded in the handle to detect it being picked up. The cutting board was another piece of wood with a large button below it to detect chops. The pestle was carved from foam with a similar button in the handle. The mortar was also carved out of foam with a rubber band mesh to add resistance when grinding with the pestle. We used an analog button to track the grinding position. We didn’t have time to make a physical bellows prop, so we used an analog button (which had approximately the right shape anyways).
This team consisted of one sound designer, two artists, and two programmers. My role was both programmer and game designer. On the programming side, my main jobs were to code all of the tools as well as the system for combining ingredients into potions and checking if they were made properly.
After one week of working on the project, we playtested and got feedback that the button layout was a bit confusing. Specifically, we had several buttons to pick the ingredients and one button to move the ingredients to the different stations. I ended up removing the move button and instead moving the ingredients when a new tool was picked up, and switching to a single button to cycle through the available ingredients.
There were two major challenges I encountered during this project. First, there are a lot of games out there that have herbs, but not real world ones, or unrealistic medicine making. I wanted our game to be educational as well as engaging. I did my best to incorporate real herbs and medicine making techniques. However, we ran into several issues with this. We had very limited time, so the artists could only make four herbs. This greatly limited the types of medicine that could be made. It was difficult to come up with interesting conditions to treat that only used those four herbs in their cures. In addition, we received feedback that the recipes were too complicated or confusing. Since this game is designed to be picked up quickly and played for only five minutes maximum, we needed to simplify. In the end, I decided to forsake some realism for an easier gameplay experience.
The other challenge was with creating an engaging interest curve. We wanted to keep players engaged and experiencing new things the whole time they played, which wasn’t the case during our first iteration. My team decided to add in a time limit per patient to add pressure to the player. We hoped that this coupled with increased recipe difficulty would create a more engaging experience. After more playtesting, I think this was the wrong choice. If we had more development time, I would remove the timer and instead increase the difficulty of the recipes, first by making the heating mechanic more complex, and then by making people think more and eventually come up with their own recipes based on what they learned about the herbs.