Hello World Devlog 2 - Millie Monster's Makeup Counter Postmortem

Well, I said I would redo the game, and redo it I did! Is it sillier? Somewhat!

I think, even though if I had stuck with the Hello World idea from the start, the current game is better and more fun than it would have ended up - despite the fact Millie Monster is way more simplistic. I decided on a concept inspired by the game Paper's Please, in which you work as a border security guard, and use various tools to accept or deny entry to the fictional nation of Arastotska. One of the tools is a guidebook that helps you keep track of which districts belong to which country- say someone has a fake district from a country, you then know their passport is fake and you can deny them (or arrest them for a bonus).

I decided to implement a simplified version of this into my game, which has you working at a makeup store for monsters- the catch is if you don't get a five-star review by the end of the shift, you are fired. I made a simple guidebook page using Harlowe's tools- my goal was to have it contain way more elements and let the player pop it up throughout the game whenever they needed, but unfortunately, I couldn't get the custom macro to work, which was pretty disappointing. To avoid messing with variables I decided to just have it as a single passage that doesn't reoccur throughout the game- The player must read about the three monster types and remember what their preferences are. For example, a slime prefers to use ultra-dry powder foundation over liquid foundation because the liquid foundation would just melt right into them. The player has three scenarios in the game where they need to pick the right dialogue option that matches what the guidebook recommends for each monster type, and if they get it right, the $stars variable is added to. There are 5 relatively simple endings in total, 1-5 stars.

I really like the idea of having the guidebook, but I definitely wish I could have had more time to make it more thorough. I would have loved to have a section for example, of multi-limbed monsters that would be a tab you open in the guidebook. I think part of the fun of the game Paper's Please was looking through the book frantically so you could make more money by letting in more citizens. In that same breath, it would have been interesting to have a countdown when interacting with a monster- The lower the number when you pick an option, the less likely you are to get a good review. I would have loved to have more scenarios as well. The good thing is the concept, and framework is already there if I ever wanted to revisit this project and expand upon my idea.

If I had any major takeaway from this assignment that I hope to apply to the next four games this semester- it's to focus on the actual nitty gritty game mechanics early on rather than the story, EVEN for a narrative game like this. If I had done that, I may have realized my "Hello World" idea was not only not interesting to me but wouldn't be that fun to play in general. I decided to redo the game a week in, basically cutting my production time in half. It's way more stressful and mentally taxing working on a game for four hours consecutively rather than having that time not only spread out, but having more of it from sticking with an idea you can build on.

This was overall a good lesson in how to approach the rest of the semester as well as my big capstone assignment which I have been experimenting for already. If I had to give myself a review, as you are seeking out in this game, I'd give myself 5 stars for learning, and maybe 2.5 for the actual product....

See you soon!