Booeys: A Ghost's Code
Role: Level Game Designer at Simcoach Games
Built by a team of 5 in 4 months
The game is available to download for free at the iOS App Store, the Google Play Store, and Amazon
Booey's A Ghost's code is a transformational, mobile title created by Simcoach Games for the Three Rivers Work Investment Board. The game's intended audience is high schoolers and recent high school graduates. The goal of the title is generate interest in technical careers (Information Technology, CNC Machinists, 3D Printing Technician, etc.) by giving players positive reinforcement when they demonstrate the fundamental skills necessary for these careers (problem solving, attention to detail, logic, algorithmic thinking, and ability to conceive and build solutions.).
Booeys is a puzzle game based on the fundamental principles of programming. In the each level of the game the player guides a ghost-like character called a Booey to help a lost child escape from a dark, scary forest. Rather than directly controlling the Booey, the player creates a program for the Booey which includes movement inputs, as well as when and how it interacts with specific parts of the enviroment, then presses play and watches the "program" execute.
Booeys features a fairly complex array of interactable elements including fire, water, plants, rocks, fences, and trees, as well as a fairly unusual and unique game mechanic. Much of the challenge of designing the game came from creating a slow, steady difficulty ramp that always provided increasing challenge and introduced new elements in a way that was never overwhelming to the player.
My Responsibilities Included:
- Designing and implementing Levels in Unity 3D
- Moderating playtests, recording playtest results, and making changes to the game based on tester feedback
- Designing tutorial UI and text
-Created an outline for dialogue branches and wrote a draft of the script.
Design Postmortem
The biggest challenge of designing Booeys was teaching players the mechanics without an frequent or overlong tutorials. Levels that are meant to introduce new mechanics are dispersed irregularly, and the difficulty curve is somewhat uneven across the entire game. For each new mechanic we had a tutorial level. These consisted of simple puzzles in which the player were given the chance to grok a new mechanic before moving on more complex and difficult challenges. For example-- One of the last mechanics that was implemented was the fence. Lost can see through fences (e.g. can see fire or the portal), but cannot walk through them. The player is presented with the fence tutorial about halfway through the level progression, after they have completed a number of medium difficulty puzzles involving previously introduced mechanics like fire, rocks, and water.
During playtests we observed that some players actually got tripped up on easy levels that were introduced midway or late into the game. They tried to craft unnecessarily complex solutions and got stuck. This obviously wasn't our intent at all. We wanted players to beat these levels on their first or second try to prove that they understand the particular mechanic or system that we were trying to teach them, then move on. The difficulty curve should have steadily moved upward, but in reality it was jagged. While it tended to trend upward there were occasional, large negative spikes in the difficulty. I think this was a barrier to players entering their flow state.
I think that we could have improved this by taking a few lessons from Super Mario Galaxy. The game is divided into worlds that focus on a unique theme (swimming, wind, etc.). Within these worlds, mechanics are introduced in a four part process called kishōtenketsu (consisting of Introduction, Rising Action, Twist, and Climax). I think that adhering to this organization structure would have behooved us. Booeys could have had worlds structured around mechanical challenges (e.g. a world focused around the use of rocks for things like building bridges across water or or putting out fires). Then individual levels within each world would follow the 4 part Mario level structure. This would have created a predictable and satifying progression through the game.
A montage showing the how the fire mechanics are taught to the player, then used in increasingly complex puzzles. First the player is taught that the Lost is attracted to light. In a later levels they are taught that they can pick up and drop fire, as well as other objects like rocks. These simple mechanics are then incorporated into more difficult challenges that test players' algorithmic thinking abilities.
