<aside> 📌 CONTENT
So Fart Away is a casual puzzle game about farting. The player controls Linguini, a young food critic who must avoid farting on people when he eats spicy foods. This game was developed during the 1° Ctrl Alt Jam, with the theme “Collateral Effect” and “Comic” modifier.
In this project I had the opportunity to design the whole campaign and here I will do a breakdown of my process, solutions and goals.
Before designing anything, it's very important to know who it's going to be made for and what the product's purpose is, so even before making the first puzzles, we stopped to think about what we wanted to deliver and to whom.
Make an engaging and funny puzzle game that will be played from start to finish by JAM attendants.
Mainly JAM attendants, an audience with diverse taste and skills, but who are willing to give our game a chance. They’re both attendants and judges, so our rating will reflect the quality of their experience.
With our goal and audience defined, we could reach some conclusions:
Our puzzle has to be casual. One way of ensuring that the game will be accessible and easy to complete.
Our campaign needs to be short and interesting.
At Game Jams players tend to want to play as many games as possible, that’s why they plan to spend just a few minutes on each game. To optimize each player's experience, we've decided to keep the campaign as short and as interesting as possible, increasing our chances to keep the player engaged until the end.
As usual the design process was iterative, we planned the initial design, then designed it, and then we sat down to evaluate what was produced, drawing conclusions of what needed to be done in the next design loop.
After having our mechanics functional and tested, we needed to think about how to teach them. We thought it would not be efficient or fun for the player to learn the game rules reading texts and with that in mind we arrived at the following conclusions:
Players should never stop to learn, they should learn playing.
That means that we must avoid using texts.