CUBICLE - post mortem

Hi there. In these past few weeks, I have been working on a game that specifically tried to evoke emotions. I was an artist and a designer on this game, and I was responsible for all of the name changes. The emotional responses this game needed to elicit were; Happiness and a sort of bouncy joy, sadness and a heavy dark depression, anxiety like a jittery panic and calmness, an almost Zen state of relaxation. To this end, I crafted a story.

The story was called Electric Sheep, and it was about a little robot who lived in a machine city. He would wake up, play his part in the machine and go home. At first, he was happy about it. But as the city grew and smog overtook the sky, something changed. None of the other robots seemed to notice, but a great big weight began to fall over our little robot. Every day was the same thing, day in day out. One day, our robot got sick of it, and decided to break the rules. To break formation. To step out of line and make a stand. This turned out to be a disastrous choice, as the city around him tore itself apart. Who knew one little robot could cause all of this? But as the smoke settled and the sky cleared, the sun came back. You see, the twist is that the robots of this machine city are solar powered. All the smog of industry clouded the sky, and required more work to keep the city running.

Alas, this story didn't happen. About 5 days before the delivery date, I and my colleague received a very interesting piece of feedback. We didn't need the robot at all. So we removed the robot, and now had to think of a way to make a laser pointing minigame emotional. It was the next day that I stumbled on the idea. Keep the same story, but remove the robot.

That was the first name change. Now instead of the robot being the worker drone, the player was. We added a scrolling text bar to deliver feedback, added more and more puzzles to our minigame, scaled the difficulty to match and added some nice lighting effects. Now we had Machine a game where you play as an employee of some vague mega-corporation, struggling with the juxtaposition of their importance as a cog in an essential machine, and the generic anonymity that goes with it. This name was later changed to Cubicle because the laser game has cubes in it and in the end, I'm a sucker for wordplay.

If we had more time with this idea instead of spending so long on the first one, I think the result would have been way better. As it stands, we did fairly well. We certainly got emotional responses from those who played the game. Some of them were even the right ones. The main things that went sideways were the puzzles themselves. While there is nothing inherently wrong with difficult puzzles, they were a bit too hard. Some people just gave up playing. A better system of designing puzzles than "rushed together at the last minute" would have helped. Like I said, we really only had 5 days to design this game.

I think we did well considering.