Role:
Year:
Platform:
Lead Game Designer
2023
PC
Engine:
Team Size:
Unity
4
Overview
We were tasked to develop a game prototype in two weeks displaying the game mechanics “collection” and “chance”. Asking myself “What if I took the brief literally and pushed the idea to its absurd limit?”, I came up with the idea of a game centered around the collection of rare scratch lottery tickets.
Since I had the forehand knowledge that the graphic artists were good at 2d character design and background work, I decided to leverage that and opted for a visual novel-style game. Such a game could have been constructed as a Unity 2D URP project but in order to visualize certain elements in three dimensions, I chose 3D URP.
Key Features
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System for Evaluating Collector Value of Scratch Tickets - Not only can the player win money by scratching tickets, they can also be sold online. The market price for the ticket is a result of its rarity, a function including the expected win amount, low serial numbers, special prints, and rare editions.
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Dynamic Generation of Scratch Tickets – Scratch ticket winner values were generated using statistical formulas and the individual fields on the tickets were distributed according to behavioral psychology present in real life scratch lotteries.
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Dynamic Dialogue System – The character dialogue scripting system I created followed extremely simple xml-like patterns, allowing team members with little to no technical skills to construct dynamic dialogues.
Scratch Ticket Generation
Since the scratch tickets are the focus of the game, they had to be constructed in a logical real-world fashion and function as actual scratch tickets, should the player decide to scratch one. After studying examples of commercially available scratch cards, I decided that the brands of tickets represented in the game would have different sale prices and that any gains from them would need to scale accordingly. I created three different prize plans modelled after the legal requirements constructed by the Swedish gaming commission that are displayed on the back of all commercially available scratch cards.
The number of printed tickets for all brands was set to 12 million, in order to allow for significant distribution. After setting the sales prices of each brand, I designed the various amounts that could be won for each ticket, i.e. the amounts that have a potential to be revealed when scratching. Since the win percentage of commercially available tickets was far too low to allow for any player progression in the game, I more than doubled it, arriving at a payout ratio of 95%.
The construction of the prize field for the tickets needed to be realistic and evoke the same psychological trigger mechanisms that real world scratch tickets employ. Even when not winning, the player should feel like they were close, meaning that there should be a high likelihood of duplicates of values. A flowchart of this prize distribution can be found on the left.
Dynamic Dialogue System
Since visual novels rely on still images of characters in various locations displaying various moods when displaying dialogue, I scripted a system for displaying dialogue in a manner similar to that of a screenplay.
This piece of dialogue is described in the following manner in a text asset:
<SCENE>
<LINE>
Ruth
Idle
Well, isn't it our favorite customer!
<LINE>
Ruth
Laugh
I tell you; this place would be out of business without you as a regular! What can I get you today?
“<SCENE>” indicates that a new scene is to be displayed. “<LINE>” indicates a new line of dialogue. The following line indicates the name of the character speaking, and the line thereafter assigns which of the character sprites that is to be loaded. Should the character delivering the next line be a different character than this one, the new character sprite is animated as moving in from the left side of the screen.
The reason I did not make the system fully XML compliant (albeit XML-inspired) was that it could be a complicating factor should dialogue be composed by one of the graphic artists with limited technical experience.
Outcome
The game is wildly unfair. Since it relies so heavily on chance, it is not “difficult” per se, it is just highly unlikely that a player will complete it. When having others test the game, two things became apparent.
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Even though the ticket payout ratio is more than double that of real-life lottery tickets, there is still a lot of balancing to be done.
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I had correctly identified the drivers of gambling behavior.
Testers would continue to play even though it was clear to them that the odds were not in their favor. This led to much frustration and exclamations of “I was so close with this one! I can turn the whole thing around with the next batch of tickets!”. One group of testers got mad at the perceived “difficulty” of the game, explaining that they had played it for more than six hours in a row and could never complete it.
While it is sad that they felt frustrated, they still felt such a connection to a game prototype that they played it for six hours. As a game designer, I take the exhibited frustration and passion as a compliment.