Bleak Friday

This GIF shows the actual gameplay of Bleak Friday, with the direct action happening on the larger right-hand side and the smaller left-hand side showing the progression, both in number of customers and time left in the day. I set up the game in this fashion so that proper urgency could be created via the player actually being able to see the long line they must face, and also to create focus via making the gameplay a more condensed space.

Project Details

A fast-paced and action-oriented single-player experience. Use your scanner and spray bottle to target barcodes and dirt/fingers blocking barcodes, respectively, to scan customers' items as quickly as possible and save yourself from being fired.

Role: design lead and systems designer
Engine: Unity 2D
Team (not including me)
- Brendan O'Leary - artist
- Jupiter Sinclair-Chong - programmer
- Josephina "Jaymie" Mazzola - experience designer

Gameplay Details

[game download link (open v1.0.1 folder and click Barcodes.exe once you download and open the file)]

Before this project began, my team was given a prompt of three verbs to develop our game around, but we were only required to use two: steer, scan, and swarm. It was from this that I developed the Black Friday theme and core gameplay mechanics within it: scanning barcodes to make progress and a swarm of customers that would get more impatient the longer they waited. I also laid out the gameplay scene view and the mouse-centered controls, which stuck for the entire project.

As a team, we then built on those concepts to add more variety and urgency to the gameplay and achieve our intended minigame experience, a goal developed over the course of the project as we realized it had the potential to emulate such old-school and nostalgic things as flash games and Cool Math games. Such build-ons included the dirt and fingers that can block barcodes and the spray bottle to get rid of them, as well as each customer's happiness meter that continuously depletes until all barcodes have been scanned, upon which the next customer enters and the meter resets: the player earns a strike whenever it fully runs out, and three strikes is a game over. A timer and indicators for where the tools were pointing were added based on feedback from a playtest designed mainly by me, both as game quality improvements and to more properly balance ease of gameplay with a sense of urgency.

What I Learned

The biggest thing I learned from this project is the true value of actually getting in an engine and directly building a game, as I only really directed the development of this project. While that didn't prove to be a major issue for this particular project, it definitely held me back personally, as while I was content in the role listed above there were times I didn't feel like a designer and didn't trust my own abilities. Thankfully, that experience motivated me to seek classes where I would have to build games in engine, which gave me the chance to identify and develop my personal skillset in level, experience, and narrative design.

The other major thing I learned over the course of this project is how to conduct an effective and thorough playtest. With team input and excellent guidance from Champlain faculty, I was able to create a testing form with a good mix of open-ended questions and focused questions designed to give us actionable feedback for improving the project. Furthermore, it was able to let us gauge how well the actual experience matched up with our intentions, giving us confidence in the project and ideas for what elements to further lean into. Here's a link to the form and the answers testers provided on it if you wish to examine them: Bleak Friday Playtest Feedback - Google Forms

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