[67Games] Ticky Tocky

edited in Projects
This is a game that I'm submitting to 67 Games. During the 67 games game jam, I talked the idea over quite a lot with @LumberJacques who also did all of the illustration (heavily inspired by @BenJet's work on various Team Lazerbeam projects). @Mexicanopiumdog did the super charming audio. I wasn't very happy with the jam game at the time, and started over after getting some feedback post-jam from @Nandrew.

Various briefs for the project described students struggling with maths, fractions and time, so this game was an attempt to tackle that. I'm not sure how successful it'll be at any of those things. (Ideally I'd have posted this way earlier to get feedback and iterate, but other more urgent projects came up.) I imagine there's still a bit of time even after Wednesday's deadline to make some changes, so I'd still be happy to hear what you think.

I have no idea whether this is engaging, and I absolutely have no idea whether this is something that primary school children would enjoy playing. I've never made an educational game before, and I don't really know how best to approach it.


Some specific things to test:
  • How obvious is it what you're supposed to do as is?
  • Is the game satisfying to play?
  • The games are being run on a machine that ONLY has up/down/left/right/enter/escape as keys. If you could make yourself only use those, that'd be great for making sure that input doesn't ever get stuck.

Things that currently don't work, but will soon:
  • daily summary doesn't actually show the recorded values. The idea's to show you the efficiency you got compared to the best possible efficiency, and also a minor commentary on what you spent the most time doing that day (or some other stat).
  • The game should end after Day 7, but currently doesn't. (And will probably break instead of showing an end game screen.)
  • Things to do with pressing Escape (e.g. returning to the main menu, quitting the game, or pressing escape to leave a menu)
  • There are lots of numbers that can be played with for balance, and extra activities can currently be added quite easily. If anyone would like to play with those numbers or add their own activities, just let me know and I can share the Bitbucket repo with you. (My commit names are poo, but my scenes and code are quite clean and should be pretty easy to work with imo.)
http://techartjon.com/unity/tickytocky/ (~7MB.)

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Thanked by 2Squidcor Nandrew

Comments

  • First impressions: it feels nice to play, things are pretty juicy and pleasant.

    It felt pretty obvious what I was meant to be doing: choosing activities between appointments.

    It terms of satisfying: it was so-so. The general level of polish made me want to play more, but AFAICT, my decisions didn't really impact things much. It feels like I could always just choose the shortest activity if I wanted to make sure I'm on time, but there also wasn't a penalty for being late.

    Sometimes the activities didn't seem sensible for the time of day. Why would I go to movies before school, or mow the lawn after dinner?

    One thing that was a tiny bit unclear: if it says I have school at 7:30, must I be ready to leave at 7:30, or beforehand? How long beforehand?

    If I press enter while it's busy counting the time, things break...

    Some ideas: have little "reprimands" if I'm late for something. If I'm late for too many things, maybe I'm grounded and can't do the nice things. Maybe I have to balance time for studying, knowing there's a test at the end of the week.
    Thanked by 2Elyaradine mattbenic
  • I think this is pretty cool :).

    Loved how you sprinkled in the challenge with the text and varying whether it was numbered/text/or fraction representations of the time - was great :).

    How obvious is it what you're supposed to do as is?
    It was a bit confusing at first. You're supposed to see how to fit the most amount of activity/time in the time you have right?

    I wasn't at all sure what the blue hand on the clock meant.

    I think there needs to be more exaggerated feedback of failure i.e.: 'when you haven't selected the most optimal time'. It should go to the time you had left over, pause for a second or two, and show in red how much time you left over on the clock. When you go over time, there should also be more of a pause for players to understand they went over, plus an annotation of how much time they went over.

    The 'if there is time' label was a bit confusing for me. I presumed it to mean: if there was time left over, use it for this activity. But it seemed to always activate, even if there was no time left?

    Is the game satisfying to play?
    It was super satisfying to play, but I seemed to get worse efficiency scores as I thought I understood the game more. Seems like there was a core misunderstanding from me somewhere.

    I'm actually super bad at time management, so I would love to see this go a bit further :).

    Input
    Input didn't bug out at all for me:).

    Random thing: I think there might be a bit too much text? Especially for the target ages. If you could reduce that, it would be ideal :).
    Thanked by 1Elyaradine
  • Woo, just got back from my long weekend visiting family, so I can spend some time fixing this now. :D

    Thanks for the feedback! I think you're both spot on. In particular, I think my UI needs a bit of work. I dunno when the final-final cut off is (as far as I understood, Wednesday's deadline was a somewhat soft one), but I hope there's at least this week still.
  • edited
    Hey this is great! I think I'm pretty happy with the evolution but we had our big chat on the previous version. The adjustments I'd make would be in line with what others have said, with an emphasis on providing more intense avenues of feedback for whether a decision is good/poor.

    I think you've nailed the accessibility/simplicity aspect and I hope kids kinda click with this right away (the amount of text is heavier than average, but maybe it's acceptable for the upper age range?).
    Thanked by 2Elyaradine Squidcor
  • Woo, put a new build up. I have no idea why anti aliasing doesn't work in the WebGL builds. Stupid jagged edges.
    http://techartjon.com/unity/tickytocky/

    The downloadable Windows version is here too:
    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9847316/win.zip

    I added a few more sounds that Ivo gave me, and tried to make the clock UI more intuitive, with some better feedback, especially when you get something "wrong". There's a small audio cue too if you chose the "best" answer, and I think the clock's clearer about that now too. I also discovered that the score-keeping was wrong, which made scores much worse than they should have been. (Thanks @Bensonance!)

    There's a minor bug where the progress bars can't really wrap around 12 noon at the moment, and ideally the activities would have been at times that make more sense, but I've spent quite a lot of time on this and I'm happy to ship it as it is, and spend more of my time on my other game prototypes/art now. :P

    Thanks for all your help!
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