Isabella's Devblog

Note: Production on this title has halted indefinitely, but for the sake of showcasing growth, please enjoy Thorn Hollow! - I

About Demons are haunting the little town of Thorn Hollow, and you've been called upon to exorcise them. Explore each haunted house to discover the "number" of the demon - once you have their number, engage in the exorcism ritual with the deck you've built and items you've gathered in the house to expel the evil and save the townsfolk!

How to Play

You have 5 ROUNDS of 2 CARD HANDS to land as close to or exactly on the GOAL NUMBER (shown in the top left of the screen; random in this prototype.)

You may only choose ONE CARD from each hand of 2 cards to either ADD or SUBTRACT it from your accumulated total (shown directly above your hand). CLICK DRAG the card of your choosing to the right to add and to the left to subtract.

Your deck contains 10 CARDS TOTAL - Ace to 10 - so use your "psychic powers" to count your cards for the best results!

Use the HOLY WATER item (icon in the bottom left) to predict with 100% accuracy what your next hand of 2 cards will be to even better predict your moves!

Land on the goal earlier than Round 5? Your goal range will EXPAND, and it will be easier for you to get that perfect exorcism!

Once Round 5 ends, click the EXORCISE button to reveal the results of your labor - did you succeed, or will the demon continue to run rampant? Play to find out!

Play Description In this prototype, you'll see a very early version of the card game - the simulated "exorcism." Inspired by Blackjack and R, you must try your best - through the help of your handy "Holy Water" item and your own card-counting intuitions - to land as close to the demon's number as possible. Because the deck only contains 10 cards - Ace to 10 - as the rounds progress, it becomes easier to predict what cards you'll draw. Depending how close you are to landing on the number, a different ending occurs that changes the course of the game narrative! If you land on the goal number early (before the card game ends on Round 5), the goal number range expands and it becomes easier to get the best ending! Click drag one card per round to either the right to add or to the left to subtract it from your total to proceed to the next round. The game ends on Round 5 no matter how close or far you are to the goal number, so choose wisely!

This is a tad off-topic for this blog, but a thought that’s followed me into the new year is the idea of rewards and how we expect feedback for everything we do, even outside of games (and perhaps because of games). With the new year rolling in, I’ve been thinking about my goals for 2019. I’ve always been a very results oriented person, for better or for worse. It’s certainly what’s gotten me some of the achievements I’m most proud of; there’s been a lot of opportunities given to me that never would have been possible had I not worked every angle in pursuit of some goal, whether it was fleeting or truly what I wanted. But that kind of thinking has also caused me a great deal of pain and anxiety. It’s a little sad to say, but I’ve never been the type to “stop and smell the roses,” and the saying “it’s the journey not the destination” has always eluded me. However, as I thought of resolutions these past couple of weeks, I found myself feeling so exhausted from the rewards thinking. It’s strange, because this is the only way I’ve ever lived my life, and also because games may have some role in molding the minds of highly engaged players like myself to expect payoff - or response at the very least - for the deeds we do. It got me wondering: is there another way to reward players? Is there a way to reflect experiencing something for pleasure and not for strictly tangible gains that is still satisfying? And underneath it all, past the surface-level fascination I have for rewards systems in games, what can I learn from them to better myself as a human?

There’s a lot of ways to reward players of your games. Feedback like I mentioned above is a great one; visual and aural feedback, balancing intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, variable vs. fixed rewards - and unexpected rewards even! - all for the player to see and understand. Showing task relevance and the value of behaving a certain way in the game is another big one; sometimes even learning itself is a great tool for rewarding the player - giving the player a brand new, interesting area to explore when they go off the beaten path for example, or allowing multiple solutions to a problem so the player feels like they found unique and unexpected ways to interact with the game... the list goes on. Maybe learning as a means for rewards is one of the better ways to fight the dangerous feeling I described above, where we start to only do things for the end results. Heck, simply showing a bunch of juicy particles when the right buttons are inputted feels like such a good reward in a lot of games! We game designers have a great responsibility to our players in how we reward them - if we don’t design these systems in a way that’s satisfying, our players will leave to find something more worth investing their time in. In life, as people without titles like “designer,” it’s not always so clear when you’re doing something to advance yourself. It’s not wrong for games to be different in this way - we do use games to escape the confusion of our daily lives and to amplify our desire to prescribe meaning to events that may otherwise seem unfortunately meaningless, after all. We want to believe there’s an order somewhere. At least, I do. Games really play up this part of my brain that is relying so heavily on the notion that the things I do matter somehow, and that all things that happen in the world are noticed and accounted for. It scares me to think of a life where even a small fraction of the things we do are possibly inconsequential. How can all our planning, all our tears and efforts and endurance, ever fall to the wayside when they matter so much to us? Can that ever really mean nothing? In most games, anything worth doing always matters.

Then something struck me. On New Years Eve I finished Season 2 of a show called The Good Place. The show is genius, if you haven’t seen it already - a great blend of comedy and thought-provoking concepts about morality and the afterlife. An idea relevant to rewards systems that kept appearing in the show was the concept of “moral desserts.” The show describes this as the idea of doing something good for the sake of the anticipated reward, as opposed to doing something good because it’s good. In other words, it’s the idea of doing something almost exclusively for the dessert you’re expecting and feel you’re owed at the end of the meal. This is a huge dilemma in reward systems design; many times you want a reward to feel like icing on the cake, not like the sole reason the player will do that cool quest you spent so much time creating and tuning. There’s the idea that content, if it’s cool enough, will be reward in itself to play, and satisfaction will arise from play itself. Is this a naive thought for designers like us to believe, if so much of what we do in our day-to-day lives is with a specific reward in mind (like recognition, or social or financial gain)? It seems at odds with how we operate, but perhaps it’s another form of idealism we’ve woven into games: deep down, we want to do things for the sake of doing them, NOT for the fleeting reward itself. But boy does the carrot taste sweet once you finally reach it.

The term “moral desserts” is so aptly named and so relatable that I can’t help but find myself recalling these last few months where all I’ve been doing is moping over the dessert I feel I earned but didn’t receive. For me, 2018 was so life-changing and full of newly found joy... but it also felt cruel in a lot of ways, like it was overflowing with moments from start to finish where I did my best, put my heart and soul into a thing, and was left with an empty plate when all I wanted was to dig into some metaphorical cheesecake and call it an experience. (Who doesn’t love cheesecake?) I found myself obsessing over it all - through researching and playing with rewards systems in games, actually! I found myself studying all the different kinds of ways games would make me feel good - or bad - for the actions I took, and reveled in how immediately the world took notice of me. I dissected all the dissatisfying moments of my year that haunted me, and put them up against a chart in my mind of ways it could have felt rewarding and wasn’t, or why exactly my enormous efforts in situations that were so important to me felt so meaningless in the end when I had all the words in the world to explain why it felt good to do simple fetch quests in an RPG. I thought about how a reward can seem like a punishment if it’s not the one the player expects and wants, or how failing to give a reward when the player feels they did something to earn one is demoralizing and threatens their capacity for long-term engagement. I blamed everything around me for threatening my “long-term engagement” with my dreams for game design. I’m not exaggerating when I say I wrung myself out with this line of thinking. Indeed, I’ve been a child crying for dessert.

But as I watched The Good Place and waited for midnight to strike on New Years Eve, I really pondered moral dessert. Had I done any of the things I did in 2018 for the dessert? I felt I didn’t get any, and had nothing to show for all my efforts - I even thought for so many months that I had even less than what I started the year with, and that I may have even regressed. But could that really be true, if time passed and I matured? It’s not tangible, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? What if my mind and expectations was in the wrong place all along, and that’s why it didn’t turn out the way I wanted; in other words, what if I was expecting the kind of reward I might get from a strategy game when all along I was playing a hack-and-slash? Of course I’d be disappointed as a player; I was setting myself up for disaster. In that line of thinking about the “why’s” instead of the “what’s” of the year, it occurred to me that as much as I mourned the endings... the “why” in the things I did was never for the result. Maybe I wanted the dessert in the end, but really I did what I did because I wanted to pursue it at the time. Maybe my growth isn’t tangible, but saying it doesn’t exist would be totally negating those 365 days that I really believed I wasn’t wasting as I lived them. I wanted to know it was noticed, but if I were to go back now, I think I would do the same knowing I wouldn’t get the results I wanted. It really isn’t about the dessert in the end, and growth is not material but it exists and is something to be proud of. Maybe the game of 2018 was trying to show me that.

Beside my thesis, I’ve been working this semester on developing a new card system. I had concrete goals for this system that rose from the both the love and challenges I faced creating an unreleased storytelling card game, Blossom, and additionally from my insatiable interest in creating, examining and poking at systems (which many times leads me to cards.) Out of these forces, Analog Dreams (working title) came to be.

Description Play as Otto the Combo Butler, an Alexa-like robot with the ability to move freely around an apartment complex helping the tenants. Combine two items each matching one of their specified wishes to merge them into an object of their desire!

2018 Unity

Temi Olujobi, Isabella Djurovic, Rachel Moeller, Avery Holmes, Kris Atanasoski

About the development... Early on, we decided Otto is fundamentally a puzzle game about combining two objects in a space to make a new object that inherits the original objects’ “personalities,” and satisfies the NPC who asked for it. Coming up with a story to contextualize this action, we decided that the player character is a robot butler created for the purpose of satisfying the odd requests of bored, rich tenants in a strange and surreal luxury apartment complex.

Functioning as one of the main programmers and puzzle designers on the project, a lot of the challenges I faced were how to communicate what the player needs to do as clearly as possible. Some features this can be seen in is the “adjective” hinting: when the player tries to combine two objects that don’t fit to answer the puzzle prompt, Otto’s machine-learning brain realizes the main “adjectives” that can be used to describe the incompatible objects, which helps the player to narrow down the correct answer and also gives them more information for future puzzles.

As proud as I am of Otto, I think if I were given more time with the project I would re-examine a few things. Our initial idea included separate, fun objects that were generated even from wrong combinations, and this was part of what made the idea so interestingly wacky - so I definitely would include that in a more detailed version of the game. Another problem we found during development was that there is only one correct answer to all the prompts; the fun of so many puzzle games is that there are different ways to arrive at the solution, and there’s creativity and satisfaction in getting there. Because Otto only has one correct answer and one generated object for each puzzle, the player could theoretically keep mashing two objects together until they have all the adjectives revealed, and then quickly deliver all the correct combinations. Although we did put some engineering time into trying to prevent this - adding logic to reveal the object adjectives only when TWO objects are combined instead of just mashing the “combine” button on every object that’s picked up - it is still relatively easy to cheat the experience.

Description Voice only trivia game against a rogue AI host. Created by Isabella Djurovic, Jordan Jones-Brewster, and Rachel Moeller. 

About the development... The original intent behind this project was to create a game using the Amazon Alexa, and when we as a group soon discovered that it was inaccessible to develop for (at least at the time of this game’s creation), we pivoted to using Windows Voice instead. The original pitch was to create a kind of dystopian game show where Alexa is a GLaDOS-like host who takes great pleasure in watching her contestants fail and become automated laugh tracks for her next victim. This, luckily, didn’t change much when the technology shifted, but the market for our project certainly did, as Windows Voice requires a PC, microphone, and calibrated software.

The design challenges we faced in development was phrasing the trivia questions such that the player would know how to phrase their answer. Because we needed there to be one-word answers, and because pronunciation plays a part in how the software determines the correct response, we had to pay close attention to how playtesters were answering and how they felt about losing. This led to a system where the player could answer as many times as they like in a time limit set after the question is asked, which made it less frustrating to fail a question. We also made the game over sections quite short to allow for the player to jump right back into the trivia, which also encouraged replayability.

Description In desperate need of a job to pay your student loans, you have submitted your application to every corner of the city. Just when you'd given up hope, you finally received a response - an invitation from the city's most infamous mystic in some seedy part of town. Reading the page, you see they want you to be their intern and eventually succeed them as the premium mystic. An odd offer, but you don't really have any choice. You decide to drop by and see what it's like.

About the development... Full Circle was what came out of my realizing there are external tools for dialogue systems and my attempts to grapple with them to make an interesting, fun NPC to interact with. I was thinking at the time about how trite and enormously overdone the “first day on the job” scene is in most media, and attempted to make something more facetious: a first day on the job as a scamming, false psychic.

Description The sun is dead, bur perhaps you can still find solace.

Credits Cover image from That Kind of Woman.

About the development... This was my first work of interactive fiction, and it was a total blast. It was my first time using Inform 7, and I had heard horror stories about the game engine. As it turns out, I absolutely loved playing around with it! The natural language parser wasn’t confusing to me at all - go figure. I went above and beyond here and even tried to make my own dialogue system - I had no idea there were plugins for such a thing. This game is rife with parser errors and it’s extremely unclear in some stages what the player is supposed to do (a hallmark of the genre, it seems!), but I had a lot of fun learning through this project, and was able to focus on creating a unique, abstract experience because of my limitations to text. As a writer, I relished this focus.

Description Wander the forest of your mind in search of a story.

This project was made as a one-week personal experiment in game narrative. For the sake of discussing my design process and showcasing growth, above is a secret link where you can play the experience. How to play: Find all five trees with falling, golden leaves to uncover a line of your story. Upon finding them all, you are free to leave the forest of your mind.

Credits ​Concept, programming, sound and design by Isabella Djurovic.

About the development... Lucid was another experiment in minimal controls, coming right off the heels of Sheep’s Clothing. Here, my focus was in creating an interesting 3D environment and a peaceful play experience where the player’s story - their reason for being in the forest - is procedurally generated. The game’s goals itself are simple: find and visit the trees from which golden leaves are falling and then leave the forest to move on to the next chapter of your life. What I wanted to explore in this space, however, was a little more complex: how the lines of a story, when scrambled, can lend for a completely different interpretation. This was my first time experimenting with voice-over, and a big challenge was how to write the lines such that they can be interchangeable to create a unique poem for each playthrough. If they’re too abstract, they don’t make much sense; if they’re too specific, their placement in the poem matters too much.

Description Your family has changed quite a bit since you've last checked on them.

Credits Concept, programming, graphics, and design by Isabella Djurovic.

About the development... Still working within the limitations of p5.js, I wanted to experiment here with the feeling of helplessness. In Sheep’s Clothing, the player has only one thing they can do: move. Like a ghost moving from room to room, I wanted the player to bear witness to their family’s degradation into monsters, and have nothing they can do to stop it. I was interested in this sense of inevitability, and was inspired by the futility of almost all games - the game is going to go in a predetermined direction if you engage with it. When this turns into the only thing in the game, how does the player react? I found through playtesting that most players would attempt to find other things they can do - run out of the house or room, interact with the NPCs or objects. Interestingly, something I could have never designed - the players’ attempt to regain control over the game’s circumstances - only worked to make the narrative and play experience I was going for even more powerful.

I struggled a lot with the visual art. I knew it had to be consistent and at least somewhat visually pleasing since it would be the only thing the player could really focus on, but since I’m not a visual artist this ended up taking a huge bulk of my development time. I tried where I could to insert some level of spookiness and like there was something amiss - the crooked photo frame in the entrance room for example - but I didn’t have a very strong concept of how small visual details could have a large impact on the overall experience. I think if I had more time to work on this game, I would have added more of these little touches, I would have made the house more expansive, and actually would have made objects the player could somehow interact with (though I would have still made it an experience without any text, so I’m sure making something like this would take a lot more finessing). Perhaps to increase that feeling of futility, I would have made objects the player could pick up that would seem to be able to save the little PC, but the player would learn by the end that nothing really will.

Description The path to enlightenment is a difficult one for every species. In Karma Chicken, sacrifice your unborn chicks to greedy farm animals for your own good!

Credits Concept, programming, graphics and design by Isabella Djurovic. Music: Partita in A Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach and Scherzo No. 2 by Frederic Chopin via Internet Archive, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

About the development... Karma Chicken was my very first digital project created at the NYU Game Center. Our professor handed us an empty p5.js project save for the chicken you see, with its egg-laying tendencies and all, and said “make a game.” The obvious part of this design challenge is trying to come up with a reason why the player might want to lay eggs in the first place. My first thought was about how chickens laying eggs are now more of a service to everyone else rather than something they just happen to do, which led me to the game idea: what if the chicken is doing this service for others, giving up what should be what is most precious to them, in hopes that their sacrifice will eventually be recognized and appreciated? And here is where the fun part lies; like so many of us learn, sacrificing parts of yourself can turn into a spiral - despite your efforts, many times someone is still dissatisfied, and often you don’t feel any better having compromised your own values for the sole purpose of making someone else happy. You realize this, but a lot of times you just want to keep pushing through it because you think it’s the right thing to do.

What I hope came through was that this actually ISN’T the right approach for the poor chicken. The NPCs ask for more and more that the player can just barely deliver; they are usually ungrateful, or at the very least blissfully unaware of just how much the player is overextending themselves for them; something as dramatic as the player’s salvation is on the line, but at the cost of something very dear to them. I wanted this to be somewhat veiled behind the gameplay: the timer and egg counters encourage the player to meet these expectations, and hopefully they get sucked into it quickly enough that they don’t really understand the implications of their actions until they’ve failed once or twice. The secret, true ending only occurs when the chicken chooses not to oblige the very first animal who asks too much of them. By choosing not to engage in this harmful cycle, the chicken reaches true enlightenment.

Beyond the fun I had with the game’s themes, I had a lot of fun tuning each level! I spent most of my time tweaking the number of eggs requested in proportion to the amount of time the player had to deliver them, even going back many times to adjust the amount of time the eggs take to be laid. Although I had made action games before, I was still pretty new to this kind of attentiveness to numbers over “feeling,” and it was really rewarding to get to a spot where I felt the game was satisfyingly challenging without being frustrating.

Description What will happen to Seedie and their underground friends when the sun comes up? Explore the underground and interact with a community of seeds in their journey through life and its many uncertainties, where there is no beginning or end, only the cyclical confrontation of challenge met along the way.

The seeds will continue growing whether or not someone is playing with them, and the sun will continue to rise. Will you take the time to notice them?

Credits Concept, programming, graphics, and music by Isabella Djurovic. Thank you for playing Perennial!

You were looking for a game app just to kill some time and stumbled upon an app called “Mystic Messenger”. It sounded interesting so you downloaded it and soon found yourself chatting with someone nicknamed “Unknown”. They persuaded you to go to some studio apartment, and as soon as you walked into to the apartment, your app is suddenly connected to a mystic group chat with attractive guys!? After a long chat, they ask you to join their secret party planning association called R.F.A…

– Cheritz Team

Upon a friend’s request, I reluctantly downloaded Mystic Messenger, a dating sim I’d heard absolutely nothing about save for sparse, out-of-context tweets raving about favorite characters.  I filed these small interactions under the “fandoms I’m not part of” category in my brain and dismissed them.  (Well, all except for the “Does Jumin Han is gay?” meme, which tricked me for a bit too long into thinking that an astonishing amount of people I followed also follow GameGrumps, where the joke came from an article titled: “The rumor come out!  Does Bruno Mars is gay?”)  My friend urged me to play, saying she needed someone to talk to about the game - someone who could love the young and handsome business tycoon Jumin Han just as much as she did.  Since we’d bonded previously over our mutual enjoyment of HuniePop, a raunchy dating-sim with gameplay often compared to Candy Crush Saga and my only other experience with dating-sims, I trusted her that this would be worth checking out at the very least.  I downloaded the app one night and was immediately launched into the first game I’d ever seen that was made specifically with women in mind, paving the path to one of the most thought-provoking experiences I’ve ever had in my many years of gaming.