Context

Questpectations is a group project made for the module 'Immersive Storytelling' in collaboration with the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. It intends to let people experience a possible scenario for the future.

In our chosen scenario communities have become smaller and much more tight-knit. Which leads to the local government introducing a system through which people can ask their fellow community members for help.

In this game we follow Koen, who is planning on spending his free Saturday helping people. He starts his day he with helping an old lady with her groceries. Along the way he finds many people who are in need of assistance. The next day, a grand festival is being held. Unfortunately, not everybody thinks that Koen did enough to help the town and berate him about it. Koen ends up leaving the festival, overcome by sadness.

Process

During this project I was assigned the role of Interaction Designer. This means I was responsible for designing the feel of the game and what kind of emotions the user would experience. Quite early in the process we decided that the player should feel some frustration, not because of bad design, but because it was intended that way. This way we could emphasize the fact that possible futures are not always as bright as they seem.

We started out thinking that a questboard would be the best way to show the pressure of the community. After testing this we realized that the questboard was not always present with the player, resulting in less pressure than we hoped for. Because of this we decided to make the quest system something that would be ever present in the players screen. To emphasize this, we decided to always have the quest count visible, to remind the player they have too much to finish.

Once these decision were made my task shifted from designing the mechanics to coding them. While coding was not my primary task, I ended up assisting the main coder quite a lot, doing users tests along the way. The users test did not result in any mayor changes to the mechanics, however, a few small changes were made regarding playability.