As the goal is to gain political influence, the player needs to to think about how their decisions will impact their power-level, which is displayed as a bar at the top of the screen. The more documents there is on thee desk, the more the power bar is drained each second, requiring the player to be quick in his/her decision making.

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The game is aimed to be experienced as light political satire and create comedic moments through the combination of outrageous political proposals and the stressful decision making mechanic. The information on the documents is made meaningful for the player by forcing them to think about how it would influence their power-level as a president.

How I would improve "Sign This, Please"

If I had more time to work on this game, I would improve its design by:

• Playtesting and adapting the document information and the decision impact on the power level according to what seems logical to external playtester (for example, this research could be done by showing potential players cards with the political proposals printed on them, and ask them to rank how they think the proposal would impact a presidents power level)

• Add UX elements that clarifies to the player how the power level is influenced by their decision and by the number of documents on the desk​

• Improve the intro/outro to better wrap the gameplay into the narrative context, for example by adding music, sound effects and visuals. The contextual wrapping is important to this game, as the decisions made by the player is meaningful only if they understand how it connects to the "story" playing out within the game.

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Personal Responsibilities

In the project I took on a management role, while assisting with asset creation, design, writing, and programming. The role included:

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• Facilitating the conceptualisation phase

• Managing and prioritizing the backlog of design tasks​

• Making pixel art

• Writing the document texts and story prompts for the intro/outro

• Programming in Unity

 

Learning Experience

Comedy through gameplay: Making the game taught me how the delivery of jokes in a game can be done through the use of its mechanics. The stressful timer made our playtesters react intuitively to the screenprompts, leading to suprising moments as they stressfully sorted through bisarre political proposals in a hunt for stronger influence.

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Story interpretation: It was difficult to write political proposals that made it clear to playtesters how their power level would be influenced by each decision. While playing, the player uses cultural intepretations to determine what is the "right" solution to each puzzle, and during playtesting it became clear that the way our players intepreted some of the cards was rather different from how we as developers thought about them, resulting in gameplay moments that the player thought of as "unfair".

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Tools used

• Unity (prototyping and testing game)

• Miro (for remotely facilitating the design and production planning processes)

• Asesprite (for pixel art)