Smile at the Birdie

'Perform your best moves to make the crowd laugh at the camera'

Made during Global Game Jam 2024 (theme: 'Make me laugh')

Puzzle design

• • After deciding that the player needs to perform certain actions to make the crowd laugh, it became clear that the core of the gameplay would be the order and the types of actions (in this case: emotes). A puzzle game seemed fitting.

  • A maximum of 4 tries (before the level resets) was added, instead of letting the player try infinitely without reset. This communicated that the order of the moves is most important, which in turn communicates that each move does something different.

  • To enforce this, up/down arrows were added after each emote, to provide information about the impact of the performed action on the NPC's. Alongside this, each NPC has 3 moods (mad, neutral, happy), denoted by an integer between 1-3. This introduced a game of deduction, where players have to figure out the exact increases/decreases of each move. This information is then used to determine the correct order.

  • After playtesting the game, it became clear that even the easiest level was quite hard for most players. This was because some players lost interest in the deduction process after no success after a certain period, and reverted to trail and error. Other players stuck through, and seemed to enjoy using the 'hard earned' information to piece together the right combination.

  • In retrospect, the gameplay experience was not unlike breaking a lock or decrypting a security key. This did not mesh as well with the tone of voice, which was goofy and joyful. Adjusting the difficutly of the puzzles, along with increasing the visual information (so less information needs to be remembered) would serve this game well to attract a wider audience.

Other duties:

• Pixel art

• Music/sound design