Playful Thinking

The Design Process

Once we had decided on The Inked Ladies project proposal, we went straight into designing the game. We used a top-down process which is visualised by the diagram below (Gamasutra, 2007).

Image from Gamasutra

This explains how bottom-up design processes focus heavily on the physical needs of the player – what must the player actually do to achieve their goal, whereas the top-down approach is highly dependant on visuals influencing the player’s behaviours instead.

The extract below differentiates the techniques used between the two approaches (Sundstedt. V., Bernhard. M., Stavrakis. E., Reinhard. E., Wimmer. M., 2013).

“In bottom-up processing, the visual stimulus captures attention automatically without volitional control (Itti et al. 1998). Low-level, bottom-up features which inﬂuence visual attention include contrast, size, shape, color, brightness, orientation, edges, and motion. In contrast, top-down processes focus on the observer’s goal; they depend on the task. Low-level features in the environment that trigger pre-attentive focus are called salient. Features that attract attention as a result of performing a speciﬁc task are called task relevant. However, bottom-up and top-down processes cannot be separated perfectly, and there is much interaction between both (van Zoest and Donk 2004 ; Wolfe 2007).”

Extract from Visual Attention and Gaze Behaviour in Games: An Object-Based Approach

By using a top-down Game design Condition we are able to focus on the visual elements and narrative of the game before determining the rules of the gameplay. For the Inked Ladies we proposed the project with the intention of creating a ‘visual feast’, where the essential experience of the player is to explore with curiosity – not just to explore for the sake of continuing gameplay – so this is absolutely vital to the overall design of the game.

Having said this, a lot of our mechanics are salient, in that the quests we have derived give the player the information they need to continue, e.g. ‘Go and get my hairbrush’. The player knows they will be looking for this and so they are less reliant on visual cues to find the desired object.

By approaching the project from either end (determining verbs, concept and context in alignment with each other) we were able to fill in the core gameplay rather effectively. For example we knew there would be a detective-style theme to the game (concept) alongside exploration and discussion elements (verbs) so using interactive narrative seemed like the appropriate main mechanic to incorporate.

We have also centred this project around communication, brainstorming and feedback. By having regular meetings we are consistently able to check progress against pipeline and assess issues we may be having. By continually evaluating our process, we can brainstorm together, bouncing ideas around and implementing what we think best suits the game. Then we can gather feedback. By constantly testing and processing feedback we can polish ideas, adjust our gameplay or scrap elements all together to create the best outcome that we can. Then we can repeat the process to refine our game. Exercises such as explaining our game ideas and asking someone to repeat it back to us gives us a strong sense of how understandable and engaging the concept is, boiled down into a few sentences. It also forces us to think outside of the box and generate creative solutions to our problems, no matter if they are technical, physical, visual etc. This process helps us to look at our work objectively and to understand why our designs are not having the desired effect, therefore streamlining the ideas of the game and developing our own analytical skills in the process.

Brainstorms for The Inked Ladies project

Finding the Art Style

The Inked Ladies is highly dependent on visual effect to compliment the narrative and drive the curiosity of the player to explore the environment. The project was initially proposed to be a ‘portfolio-builder’ allowing us plenty of time to creatively explore our work and thoroughly investigate and iterate our designs.

Art style for any game is absolutely vital right from the start of production. This article from Truancy factory succinctly states: ‘If something looks good, people will buy it, even if it turns out to be worthless from a gameplay perspective. Customers can see the graphics in ads and trailers but not experience the gameplay directly so they are forced to go by what is immediately apparent’. (Finch. D., 2011). This article later discusses the term ‘Translation Time’ in relation to how effectively we can process visual information. If it takes less time and effort to process, the result tends to be better immersion within the game, hence why hyper-realism as a style is usually very captivating and abstract games can be somewhat more niche to the market.

As mentioned in an article on medium, Anderson Addo states that good graphics can be costly, and that they can either act as a barrier or a gateway into gameplay immersion. Bad graphics block good gameplay and this is exactly why the visual cohesion needs to be strong in a game like The Inked Ladies – with simpler mechanics to rely on we have weighted our game much more in the direction of visuals. This follows through the whole process, impacting impressions, gameplay, marketing etc. so establishing this at the beginning of the process was our main priority.

So what did we do? We knew our game would have a cross-media style in that there would be hand-sculpts and 3D models in the environment but the visual novel interactive narrative elements would be 2D, so we really had to focus in on the characters. We had a strong idea of what we wanted from the get go – a bitter, snappy snake charmer, a sickly sweet and somewhat fragile quick-change artist and the mysterious and, quite frankly, creepy fortune teller. Our first stages were drawing for the sake of getting ideas onto paper and they missed the mark –

First attempt at character designs

When presenting these ideas, the immediate feedback was that they didn’t represent the experience. There was nothing intriguing about these characters, nothing that said ‘Something is going on in this circus tent but I don’t know what’. These designs were considered too cute and didn’t fit the environment or the essential experience so I took this information and set about making mood boards of art styles much more closely related to our desired experience, finding references on Pinterest and looking at artists such as Adam Ellis.

Images by Adam Ellis (@adamtots)

Images from Pinterest

By implementing similar design techniques such as the black outline and more fantastical themes we felt much more confident with these designs, and so we put them to the test.

The Snake Charmer

The Quick-Change Artist

The Fortune Teller

So how do you know when it’s ‘right’?

In a similar way to playtesting, we presented the designs above to a group of people for feedback. Without giving them context, we asked questions like - What do you think this character does? What is their backstory like? Do you think they are friendly or hostile? We even ask questions such as what do you think they eat for breakfast? And if they were going to the cinema what would they watch? This helps us to build a picture of what other people perceive from these designs and how we can effectively convey information about the entire game through visual elements. For example when receiving feedback from the Fortune Teller design, two of the most useful comments were;

“...the skirt is similar to a big top, there's impaled teddies and skulls... is this a freakshow act at a circus that kills children? Another thing I noticed is a death card, the eye suggests a third eye which might come into fortune telling and there's plenty of symbols and numerals suggesting they might have something to do with tarot cards?"
"I'm getting some type of gothic circus monster vibe from it, perhaps a child that went through some kind of tragedy (teddy bear, bows, etc)? Maybe a child had a traumatic experience at a circus, and now works as a fortune teller and kills more people as an adult".

This immediately tells us that our potential player audience can understand exactly what details we are trying to communicate through our visual designs. From here we took this art style and applied it to our other assets and characters.

2D journal UI

Journal Collectibles UI

Designing a Captivating Narrative

The next step for The Inked Ladies was do design a compelling narrative. The key ideas we started with were:

An all-female cast based on my tattoo culture research
A young female protagonist
A mother-daughter relationship

The ideas that came from my tattoo culture research is that tattooed women in the circus were marketed as ‘Tattooed Beauties’ but were considered ‘circus freaks’ in general, hence the novelty aspect. There are also plenty of stories of tattooed women throughout history who have sold stories alongside their tattoos for various reasons (financial, social acceptance etc). These two factors led us to create strong backstories to our characters of abandonment or social branding for example so a lot of our narrative development came from our research.

We also wanted to link the objectives in the game to an emotional connection with the mother figure, despite her not being an active part of the game. We developed an exploration scene in which the player can pick up various objects linked to her mother’s disappearance, leading to different details being revealed at the end of the game (NB: this couldn’t be included but was part of the original plan).

Once we had decided on the main plot of finding out details about the mother’s disappearance, we fell on the idea of making it into more of a social experiment. We have an end ultimatum for our player and so we wondered if we could affect the player’s decisions depending on what information they were told about the mother character, or how they were told this. Now this was the case we had to create compelling language for each character to use in their own unique way whilst also not overloading the player with information.

When looking into types of narratives we had to choose which would best suit our gameplay. This article from Pinnguaq explains the differences between the narratives:

"A linear narrative is a story progression that follows a very specific forward-motion set of events that doesn’t allow the player to back track, skip ahead or influence the storyline at all. Some popular games in this style include: Super Mario Bros, Sonic The Hedgehog, Prince of Persia"
"The string of pearls narrative model is when game play has a general linear progression but can be influenced by the player. This style includes a level of interactivity that gives the player freedom to choose different missions or side quests. Some popular games include: Final Fantasy and Uncharted"
"A branching narrative is a more complicated type of narrative which is central to the players choices. This narrative type allows the player to control the progression of the plot and changes the ending depending on their choices. An example is the popular PS4 (PlayStation 4) horror game, Until Dawn"
"The amusement park model is similar to the branching model and is a common strategy for open world games. It allows the player to control the story through interaction but rather than completing missions or side quests, the player finds these branches through interacting with the NPC that is attached to that particular storyline. An example of this is the popular game series Assassin’s Creed and Skyrim"

We found that a branching narrative would be best for our individual conversations, however the overall gameplay is more similar to a string of pearls model in which the gameplay must follow the same narrative, it is just the NPC content which changes.

Image from Pinngauq.com

We then went ahead and planned out our narratives, first using twine, then processing this into a flow chart and finally putting each NPC Dialogue ID and Player Response ID into a word document to copy and paste into our .xml file.

Original narrative made in Twine

Of course, throughout the process we were repeatedly testing our designs to understand whether they were having the desired effect as part of our experience. The main feedback I have sampled below was deciding on whether to use purely speech-based dialogue or story-driven dialogue;

For example, our pure dialogue version looks like this; “At last. You're lucky I got this in time. Two more minutes and I'd be late for the show. How do I look?” whereas the story-driven opening NPC dialogue is written as; “Ah... much better. It’s a shame you took so long but no matter, I'll still look gorgeous". She gives herself a pout in the mirror and then turns back towards you. "What do you think?". The first is much more abrupt in tone and the second gives a wider context to the scene whilst tying the characters to the environment, however we wanted to gather feedback on which is more immersive for the player -

“Adding a Narrator could give quite a nice effect, with having voice actors reading the characters lines and then the Narrator reading the in-between parts of the story”
“Maybe the Narrator is the main character recalling events or something”
“I think the story based style could be more effective, it’s very much a tossup between what you're showing on the screen and what you'd like to fill in with the words you're presenting to the reader”
“I love this, it brings so much character to Vipera and also brings out so many possibilities with the dialogue choices”
"Perhaps each choice could lead to a different thing about your mother being discovered, so that entices the player to go through every route in order to piece together what happened? It’s not my game, but I love the interactions!"

This was really positive feedback for us as it re-enforced a lot of our personal design choices as well as reminding us of our original ideas such as voice acting and individualised cutscenes for each ending.

Storyboarding and Cutscenes

For the storyboarding I wanted to create a series of square images on a black background with our text below for the viewer to read (potentially with music overlay and voice acting). For these cutscenes I started by looking at the Etherington Brothers and a variety of artists for inspiration, including Natalie Nourigat (@tallychyck), Gervais Merryweather (@gervaismerryweather) and Daniel Tal (@daniel.m.tal).

I study the Etherington Brothers often when composing storyboards and cutscenes. They very clearly and effectively demonstrate the uses of different dynamic shots and how to compose your scenes to effectively communicate your story to the viewer. Below is an example of this:

Images from The Etherington Brothers (@etheringtonbrothers)

In this example we can see how the different shapes and compositions can affect how we perceive an environment. Using this as a guide, I then made my own shots for the first cutscene. The opening image in our introductory cutscene is an establishing shot of an isolated old barn shed in the fields in a nighttime environment. There are multiple ways we can do this and below are two examples.

The first image is from a low perspective, making the barn shed look daunting and intimidating, plus it doesn’t give any environmental context. The example on the right shows the shed as well as negative space on the right so the viewer can expect something to be approaching the shed or for an event to take place. It puts the shed into context and the eye-level view makes it feel neutral (neither intimidating nor friendly for a first introduction).

Images sketched in Procreate

I then looked at a few examples of storyboard artists from Instagram.

Image by Dean Kelly (@deankelly_work) - Pixar Story Supervisor

Image by Natalie Nourigat (@tallychyck) - Head of Story at Disney

Looking at Natalie’s work on Ralph Breaks the Internet and Dean Kelly’s work on Coco, we can see that the images are kept simple and are very clean to interpret. I wanted to incorporate similar techniques as to what they used to effectively construct my storyboards. They should be quick and easy to iterate on, so here was my first approach (using Procreate, 6B pencil (Sketching)):

Rough storyboards for The Inked Ladies opening sequence, sketched in Procreate

I then looked at work by Gervais Merryweather and Daniel Tal.

Image by Gervaise Merryweather (@gervaismerryweather) - previously worked for Laika and Netflix

Image by Daniel Tal (@daniel.m.tal) - Story Artist at Dreamworks

They both use grayscale to quickly demonstrate depth in a scene using 3 different shades. I used this on my storyboards with more detailed lineart to use as a base before taking my thumbnails to the next stage of creation.

Opening scene image, sketched in Procreate

After finishing these I went straight into full rendering. Using Procreate, I worked on a canvas of 2160px x 2160px at 600DPI. I use my lineart as a reference and paint directly in colour on a new layer above this using the Nikko Rull brush (Painting), sometimes adjusting the secondary colour jitter in the colour dynamics to achieve the ‘HeavyPaint’ look for these scenes. I then add details in further layers over the top using the Nikko Rull brush and the Round Brush with 25% spacing until I reach a final result for each frame.

Final image for the opening scene in The Inked Ladies

Social Media and Marketing

When starting the project, we knew that marketing would be a major factor in how successful the game would be. We have spoken to professionals such as Melissa Chaplin regarding marketing advice and we took this further by looking at various articles and statistics too.

This article entitled ‘Marketing your Indie Game: The Single Most Important Thing to Learn’ showcases 4 bullet points:

‘When to begin Marketing Your Game’
‘What Every Game Development Team Should be Doing’
‘Publicize Yourself’
‘Late Stage Marketing’

(Envatotuts+, 2014)

There are plenty of tips and tricks in this article that we have been implementing in our project. Advice such as ‘Begin your marketing campaign the moment you have something that illustrates the fundamental mechanics and look of your game’ has been invaluable to our social media marketing. We started The Inked Ladies Instagram with images of our concept sheets and 3D models, then moving onto in-game assets and finished screenshots.

Screenshots from The Inked Ladies Instagram (@the_inkedladies)

According to our professional dashboard on The Inked Ladies Instagram Account, we can see that the top 3 countries our followers are from is The United States (26.1%), The United Kingdom (20.5%) and Brazil (9.1%), with the majority of our audience being 25-34 year olds (43.2%). We can also see a breakdown of when our account has gained or lost followers as well as when the best time to post is:

Screenshots from The Inked Ladies Professional Dashboard on Instagram

Twitter has been much harder for us to get a grasp on. We have been using the hashtags and tweeting when we can but these events are usually so full of participants that we often get drowned out into the pile of other indie game devs vying for attention. Despite this, hashtags like #screenshotsaturday, #indiedevhour and #madewithunity have been a great boost to our work.

Screenshots from The Inked Ladies Twitter (@ladies_inked)

We recently found a tweet from Mariusz Kowalczyk with data on which hashtags are best to use regarding visibility for game devs and we will be using this moving forward to more effectively promote our game;

Image from Mariusz Kowalczyk (@unusualsoft)

The previous article also discusses the importance of other forms of media. Of course, we have been writing our development blogs all the way through our project, however we have also factored in trailers and devlog videos for our marketing scheme as well when we are able to host events to showcase the game. Below are the brainstorms and designs for our marketing scheme:

Producing high-quality gameplay trailer(s) and devlog videos
Arcade Case and Banner Showcasing the visuals for The Inked Ladies
Physical Marketing Pieces for events – display of the hand-sculpted assets with dollhouse style scene, takeaway postcards and charms in the theme of the game, headphones with early music samples etc.

Designs for The Inked Ladies Arcade Case

Many other articles encourage the same behaviour; extensive use of social media, working with gaming news media if possible, producing eye-catching trailers etc. I then looked into some statistics about indie game marketing and I came across the stats for the game Headliner, published on Gamasutra. The article goes into depth about when and where these stats came from and a lot of these are likely to apply to our game too;

The majority of sales happen 1-2 weeks after release
How to publicise the game (e.g they had a pre-launch party, went to various gaming festivals etc.)
Despite having coverage on ChilledChaos’ Youtube channel, the conversion rate to sales was approximately 0.5%

They also found that 40% of their player base (who shared their results) had completed the game twice or more, meaning their replayability for the story-led narrative game is quite high. This is useful for us in that our game is very narrative-driven so we can assume some sort of positive replayability in our own game given that our audience may be of a similar demographic.

References

Lopes. G., Kuhnen. R., Gamasutra (2007) Game Design Condition: The Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches [Online]. Available at: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130542/game_design_cognition_the_.php (Accessed 8th of May 2021).

Sundstedt. V., Bernhard. M., Stavrakis. E., Reinhard. E., Wimmer. M. (2013) Visual Attention and Gaze Behaviour in Games: An Object-Based Approach [Online]. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256109747_Visual_Attention_and_Gaze_Behavior_in_Games_An_Object-Based_Approach (Accessed 8th of May 2021).

Finch, D., (2011) The Surface of Things: Why Graphics Matter in Video Games [Online]. Available at: http://www.truancyfactory.com/articles/graphicsMatter.html (Accessed 8th of May 2021).

Addo. A., (2017) Pretty Pixels – The Importance of visuals in game design [Online]. Available at: https://medium.com/the-cube/pretty-pixel-the-importance-of-visuals-in-game-design-5f3ae148a41e#:~:text=The%20visuals%20of%20a%20game%20are%20what%20draw,one%20of%20the%20player%E2%80%99s%20main%20tickets%20to%20immersion (Accessed 8th of May 2021).

@adamtots (2021) Adam Ellis [Online]. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/adamtots/ (Accessed 10th May 2021).

Milne. C. (2021) Video Game Narrative: The Different Types and How-to Start Writing [Online]. Available at: https://pinnguaq.com/learn/video-game-narrative (Accessed 8th of May 2021).

@etheringtonbrothers (2021) How To Think When You Draw #263 [Online]. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/COAGVp3LS3n/ (Accessed 10th of May 2021).

@etheringtonbrothers (2021) How To Think When You Draw #264 [Online]. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/COCw6YyrGi4/ (Accessed 10th of may 2021).

Kelly, D., (2020) Original Pixar Coco Storyboard [Online]. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBsBkfjDai8/ (Accessed 10th of May 2021).

Nourigat, N., (2021) Storyboards from Ralph Breaks the Internet [Online]. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CNuxGsDh3LM/ (Accessed 10th of May 2021).

Merryweather, G., (2021) Heist [Online]. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/COinXfLjrA9/ (Accessed 10th of May 2021).

Tal, D., (2021) Potion Seller [Online]. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CN5bFj7F7fg/ (Accessed 10th of May 2021).

Dellafave. R., (2014) Marketing Your Indie Game: The Single Most Important Thing To Learn [Online]. Available at: https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/marketing-your-indie-game-the-single-most-important-thing-to-learn--gamedev-7157 (Accessed 10th of May 2021).

Kowalczyk, M., (2021) GameDev Tweets [Online]. Available at: Mariusz Kowalczyk (Game Dev) on Twitter: "Not sure which hashtags should you use in #gamedev tweets? Check my list. #indiedev #gamedevelopment https://t.co/fGhpEU8NT5" / Twitter (Accessed 11th of May 2021).

Kasztalski. J., (2017) HEADLINER Indie Game Sale & Marketing Stats, 3 Months after Steam Release [Online]. Available at: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JakubKasztalski/20171228/312330/HEADLINER_Indie_Game_Sale__Marketing_Stats_3_Months_After_Steam_Release.php (accessed 10th of May 2021).