When working on my capstone game Stop and Breathe, a game that sets out to show the player how to breathe to reduce anxiety and the effectiveness of doing so, we wanted to make sure the game mechanics the player is interacting with are both easy to understand and provided opportunities for interesting puzzles. One of the mechanics we decided upon was the classic key and lock. In our case it was a book and bookshelf that works like a combination between another classic, the box and button, and the lock and key. What I mean by that is the book in the game world is shaped like a box and, for all intents and purposes, is a box, however the bookshelf is works more like a lock where the key is putting the right book subject into the right bookshelf (e.g. The green science book can only fit in the green bookshelf and not the blue math bookshelf.)

Since the book and bookshelf are such a pivotal part of the puzzle solving, it is very important that this mechanic is the easiest to learn, use and understand. Every puzzle in the game, baring maybe a few, requires some use of the book and bookshelf. Ensuring that the book and bookshelf are user-friendly improves the chances of the player completing the game and experiencing the whole story and message. If the player does not complete the game because of frustrations caused by the puzzle mechanics, then they will likely not learn the breathing technique the game sets out to teach and possibly miss out on the message. Thus, the game fails at the goal it is trying to achieve.

The loop of the game is exploring to find the breathing circle, doing the breathing exercise, and then solving the puzzle to progress to the next room to repeat the loop.  Frustrations, anxiety, and anger do not belong in the puzzle section of the game since it goes against the message that we want to portray. Breathing to calm your mind and think clearly is the message we want to send. If the puzzle mechanics cause the player to feel these negative emotions, then we are failing to achieve the design that we want for the puzzle phase of the game.

Now with the goal in mind, how can I make this puzzle mechanic that utilizes a sometimes really unpredictable part of game engines, the physics system, and make it predictable on top of ensuring that the mechanic’s functionality is as clear and easy to use as possible. As stated before, if this mechanic is not easy to use and unpredictable, then we risk having the message of the game be lost because of a system that isn’t user-friendly. It would be a shame for someone who could benefit from a game like Stop & Breathe to stop playing because the designers didn’t account for the user experience when solving puzzles.

             My approach for designing this mechanic is multifold, when first deciding what kind of puzzle mechanics should be added, the box and button came up as a simple to understand mechanic that is a very well known anchor that many puzzle games such as Portal, and many others use in some form. However, the game’s setting is based in a school, so we had to retool it to fit better with the theme, which is how we ended up on the book and bookshelf. Now that the mechanic was decided, I still need to add functionality that makes it as user-friendly as possible. Like usual, the mechanic wasn’t perfect on the first try. Using feedback from multiple playtest, I saw there was something wrong with the mechanic. Players had trouble trying to place the book on the bookshelf, and they didn’t immediately know what was going to happen when they pressed F/X to interact with the book. There was an overall discontent with how the book worked. With these new observations, I turned to Celia Hodent’s book The Gamer’s Brain to look for what UX pillars were missing from this mechanic that could improve the experience.

Because the language on that appeared above the box was non-specific, players were hesitant to press F since it was a book and books in games usually open up text on screen after interacting with it. The players were not certain at first what will happen if they interacted with the book. Changing the language to be more specific aligns with Hodent’s clarity pillar, also does the culling of prompts for objects the player won’t pick up if the key is pressed.

There were two more UX pillars that I thought would greatly improve the player’s experience without changing how the mechanic worked too much. The first, which is minimal workload. From playtests, when the players tried to place the book in the bookshelf, it seemed to be a finicky process. To reduce the workload on the player, I decided to add a feature that if the player has the box within a radius around the bookshelf and that it’s the right type of book, they could press F and the game would place the book nicely into the shelf for them. This solution both helps with the sometimes hard to control nature of controlling a physics object with the player controller and with fitting a box in a hole that is barely bigger than the box itself. The second, which is a must for every game, is good signs and feedback, for this mechanic, there are two things that provide the player with feedback. First is the change in text following up a clarity pillar, the text changes from “drop” to “place” when the box enters the bookshelf’s radius. The second is that the paint on the bookshelf that signifies the type of book that is required for the shelf will light up, indicating that the shelf will accept the book and trigger the connected objects

With these solutions implemented into the game and tested on outside play testers. I found that, like most mechanics in games, the books and bookshelves can still be improved upon. However, it is in a state where this mechanics does its job and doesn’t get in the way of the player trying to solve the puzzle, unless they don’t have the book required to finish the puzzle of course. Players seem to never second guess using this mechanic in any way. As soon as they see the book for the first time, they approach it and pick up the box right away. Then, once the box is in the radius of the shelf, they place it in like it’s almost second nature. To me, this is a success enough to call this mechanic done for now and time to move on to adding and improving other mechanics so they are as easy to use as this one.