The general idea for the game was to create a "social-avoidance" game where the player must evade people while completing objectives. The player is on a timer, and must earn a certain amount of trust for both mafias by the end of that timer. Each objective also has its own timer.

     Given that this game was made in ~20 hours of development time, its natural that everything isn't perfect. There are parts of the game that have turned out well, and parts that did not. It is important to analyze and document these because if there is ever another iterative design loop performed, we will have properly identified risks and boons and can deal with them properly. Here I will go through what we did right, as well as what we did wrong.

What Was Unsuccessful

     None of us were able to truly play our game until the same time players were able to! Within the last hour of the jam, all of the separate parts we had been working on were brought together, effectively assembling the experience. This means there were no iterative design loops taking place during development! (which is to be expected in a game jam I suppose...)

     When listening to player feedback after the jam, there were a few consistent points. The most prevalent of which, was in the feel of the character. By this, I don't mean the actual controls of the character, rather that controlling the character was not fun all the time. During the jam, we made a conscious decision as a group to limit the players movement so they would focus on evading conversation. However, at that moment it was still unclear to us how or what exactly the tasks that the player would be achieving would actually be like. In the final game, the tasks require the player to walk across to different ends of the manor and dodging AI along the way. Many players felt that there was too much walking. The nature of this game revolves around feeling sly and dodging social situations, and walking is an essential part of the games current gameplay.

     So what if instead we made walking more fun to do? One suggestion that arose during player feedback was adding a character ability that allows for a brief burst in movement, allowing players to take on risk to squeeze into small gaps instead of playing it safe and waiting it out. In a social setting, this could be presented as stepping in sideways as a quick squeeze through a crowd. The idea is that this would be an ability run on a cooldown, which would mean the player would need to manage how they use this power. Since the game is on a timer, this would add more depth to the games strategy.

     Another frequent piece of feedback was that enemy mafia sight detection was too hard to grasp. The reason for this, is we used the static mesh of a cone for both the sight guide AND the collision. This resulted in a weird shape that is hard to see from the games angle, as well as the collider being the exact same size as the visual guide. In situations like these, it's better to give the player a fair amount of wiggle room to keep things feeling fair.

     Some of the mechanics were not clear enough to players. Firstly, the players had a hard time finding the objectives. It was inconsistent whether or not the room names were mentioned in the task UI. And even if it was, the room names were not displayed to the player at all. We would fix this by letting the name of the room you enter briefly appear on screen upon entering. This would allow players to get the names of the room, but require them to create their own mental map of the manor. 

     The timer for the duration of the night was also not clear. By this, I mean that there is no inherit way in the UI to show the player how much time is left. The only way they can know is if they have already either won or lost a game.

      There were also some aspects of the gameplay that we were unable to implement within our time limit. For one, if a mafia member of the same type that the player currently has on catches the player doing their task, the player would be punished more severely. We wanted to create a game where the player had to be more aware of their actions given the context of their surroundings-much like a spy would.

     We were also unable to finish up some of the programming for the systems, notably for the task queue system. By the end of our time limit, players would get soft locked if they failed even a single task, as there was no way to refresh that task or get another from the task giver.

What Was Successful

     While its important to analyze risks and issues to mitigate in a potential next development loop, it is equally important to analyze and document what was successful with this development loop! 

     From the outset of the jam, we discussed our goals for the jam. We all agreed that we wanted to try to make a game that was different than games we've made at previous jams. Previously, we had done a lot of action games. This time, we wanted to create an experience that made the player feel slick, like a secret agent. I feel that we succeeded in created a feeling of suave to the gameplay. Players have to act natural while doing tasks, or else they risk losing the trusts of the mafias as well as the game.  

     Players were very pleased by the games comedic tones. It actually wasn't our intention to make the game silly at first, but with boots on the ground at a game jam, its important for us to have our fun too. We shifted the tone of the aesthetics and dialogue to be more humorous, which ended up being a popular trait with play testers at the jam.

     The game had quite a lot of features and polish for a game made in ~20 hours. The four of us were able to put our knowledge to good use and made great time in many respects! Some players even said that they could easily see the game being on Steam(which is quite a compliment!)

     The design for the game had some strong points to it. The concept of playing as a double-agent is interesting, and the gameplay suits that fantasy pretty well. The player has to be conscious of their appearance in the eyes of the NPCs while moving around the manor. This creates a sense of sleekness when properly fooling the mafia members.