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News - ALT.CTRL.GDC Showcase: Cursed!

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ALT.CTRL.GDC Showcase: Cursed!

<div style="margin: 5px 5% 10px 5%;"><img src="https://www.sickgaming.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/alt-ctrl-gdc-showcase-cursed.jpg" width="646" height="362" title="" alt="" /></div><div><p><em><strong>The 2020&nbsp;Game Developers Conference&nbsp;will feature an exhibition called&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gdconf.com/events/altctrlgdc.html">Alt.Ctrl.GDC</a>&nbsp;dedicated to&nbsp;games that use alternative control schemes and interactions. Gamasutra will be talking to the developers of each of the games that have been selected for the showcase.</strong></em></p>
<p><em>Cursed!&nbsp;</em>is a game of competitive magic potion making, with players battling for the spellbook and cauldron in order to cure themselves of some nasty afflictions.</p>
<p>Gamasutra sat down with the developers of <em>Cursed!</em>,&nbsp;Yufei Zhang and Yating Wu, to learn about the thoughts that went into making potion brewing into a competitive affair, how they worked to make potion-making as straightforward as possible, and in communicating gameplay through the look of the controller alone.</p>
<p>The name of the group is WeHaveNoCat. Yufei is the illustrator, visual designer, and&nbsp;programmer of this game. Yating is the engineer and the fabricator of the game. The concept of&nbsp;the game was teamwork. And to be honest, this is a two-member group so most things are the&nbsp;result of close teamwork.</p>
<p>Neither of us has&nbsp;had much experience in making games before grad school, but we&nbsp;like playing them. Yufei comes from an engineering and illustration background, and Yating&nbsp;comes from an advertising and interaction design background. In our program, Design and&nbsp;Technology, we both made several board games and alt-control games for classes and fun. The&nbsp;spark of this game came from one of those classes.</p>
<p>It’s a pot with some potions and a magical book. You just do witchy things you see in the&nbsp;movies;&nbsp;it’s as simple as that.</p>
<p>When we were brainstorming a concept for a game, alchemy and magic was just a domain we&nbsp;both think has huge creative space to make something quirky and intriguing. However, we didn’t&nbsp;want to just make a magic adventure game. So, we drew some concepts and then came to this&nbsp;image of two players fighting over a pot trying to put curses on each other. It was really fun to just&nbsp;come up with random curses and imagine how those curses would&nbsp;look like on the players. So, we&nbsp;decided this was the way we wanted to go, and after more game concept development, this&nbsp;competitive alchemy game is the one we landed on.</p>
<p>When we designed the mechanism of brewing potions, we wanted the process to be simple and&nbsp;direct. We decided to use combinations of several basic potions as the recipe to make different&nbsp;curses. First, it had to be determined what element each basic potion represented,&nbsp;and then, based on the combinations of those&nbsp; elements, what each curse should be.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The second problem would be the game mechanism of adding and removing curses. At first, we&nbsp;thought to remove curses with spell chanting or ritual, but it just became so much of a parallel&nbsp;system that it shifted&nbsp;the core of this game. So, we designed it in a way that you simply add&nbsp;curses by drinking corresponding potions, and remove this curse by drinking the same potion&nbsp;again.</p>
<p>It’s our philosophy that the controller should make the action as realistic as possible, so when&nbsp;the player sees&nbsp;the controller for the first time, they can just interact with the controller with a very&nbsp;short learning period.<br /> However, that does not mean the game itself is simple. The difficulty of this game comes into&nbsp;play when the player has to find the corresponding recipe and grasp the timing of adding&nbsp;potions. The action of adding a potion itself is not a part that requires players to continuously&nbsp;practice to become proficient.</p>
<p>When we designed the first version of the game, the recipe book was not part of the game&nbsp;controller and the players had to figure out what each combination of potions resulted&nbsp;in. Then, they had to memorize each recipe. The problem with that was there was so much information&nbsp;that the players needed to handle so they just ended up randomly mixing. So, this time we made&nbsp;a book with all the recipes on it for players to check.</p>
<p>The game is programed in Unity and the illustrations/animations are made in Photoshop. We&nbsp;use Arduino as the processor of the controller.</p>
<p>The shelves are all made of&nbsp;wood;&nbsp;we made them from scratch. The rest of the parts like the pot, the book&nbsp;and bottles are all items we bought from shops and then altered using laser cut and paintings.&nbsp;And then, of course, there are all the electronics.</p>
<p><img alt height="362" src="https://www.sickgaming.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/alt-ctrl-gdc-showcase-cursed.jpg" width="646"></p>
<p>The action of adding potions into the pot is the core gameplay, but that doesn’t have much&nbsp;variety, and after a couple of interactions players would lose interest. However, we liked how&nbsp;simple this action was, and we didn’t want to just make a game about potion making. By having&nbsp;the two players sharing and fighting for parts of game items, multiple layers are added to the&nbsp;action of adding potions. Not only did players need to pay attention to what potions should be&nbsp;added to the pot, the timing and the order of adding action also become something players need&nbsp;to take into consideration. So, it makes the game more interesting even after multiple times playing it. And the interaction with another player&nbsp;itself also adds to the fun of playing this game.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The colorful look of the curse and potion elements are mostly for communicating the game&nbsp;information. It’s so the players can quickly figure out what potions are in the pot and what kind of&nbsp;curse they have on them immediately.&nbsp;</p>
<p>We also wanted to make the looks of curses on players more exaggerated&nbsp;so that when a curse is&nbsp;added to a player, it is fun to see it instead of&nbsp;just being frustrating.&nbsp;Also, we know the topic and the narrative of this game is a bit heavy, so we didn’t want to make&nbsp;the vibe of the game to be all depressing and heavy by making all of the assets super-realistic. We add&nbsp;some cartoonish style into the art&nbsp;to lighten the game atmosphere.</p>
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https://www.sickgaming.net/blog/2020/02/...se-cursed/
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