Between January 8th and 10th, our BPB Game Jam – Team 2 developed under 24 hours of planning, debating, crafting and programming a very short, interactive narrative experience titled Mindfits. This article describes my journey and the process of working as a narrative designer with an absolutely amazing team.
With Mindfits, we wanted to create an experience of frustration, where your brain starts to look for patterns and structures of meaning to help you solve an unsolvable task. Sometimes, things do not have to fit a pattern. Maybe, things just need to be accepted as they are in their true, raw nature. This message is important to us, as the game should appeal to a wider audience of players approaching the game with different problems.
Day 1: 6 PM TO 8 PM
For our very first meeting, we were talking about the general idea and used a lot of post-its.
We decided to call it a day after two hours as the whole morning and afternoon was used to present us the topic by the BPB-team. As we still wanted to be productive and have something to start on in the morning, we left of with a broad idea. I stayed longer and turned our ideas into a narrative path/plan:
Day 2: 9 AM – 3 AM (Day 3)
On the second day we used the narrative design plan as a guideline for designing art and the actual tasks. Designing with the principle of show-don’t-tell in mind, all the elements of our experience needed to work without explanation on our end. Initially we wanted to have an extra ‘decoy’ task where players would get random tools with which they need to figure out how to combine and solve the decoy task, but we scraped that idea in the production as it did not communicate our vision that well. We did lose quite some time on debating our options but that is part of a design process.
In the late afternoon our programmer started to build the structure, our artist started to draft and then create the final art and the design team then was responsible for building the ambience with respective sounds. Questions we needed to answer were like what sound does a dough make or how does a plant sound like? It was a very creative task which I enjoyed very much.
As the day was making the transition into the next one, everyone except our programmer went to slumber. He was busy, as he recounted in the next morning, re-building the code as he somehow managed to lose quite some progress. Hence, he was working until 3 AM to fix this issue.
Day 3: 9:30 AM – 11 AM
We still had some time left until the submission deadline at 11 AM and used the time to polish the game and put the last puzzle pieces in their respective places. 1 minute before the clock struck the end for admissions, we managed to send of our project which you can test for yourself here https://nattnpc.itch.io/mindfits.
Playful Brain Demand 