Primitive Resentment Design Analysis

Primitive Resentment is a point and click narrative game, that combines dark and violent themes with heavy absurdist elements. The choice to create a point and click game was made to decrease the scope of the game, having an immovable deadline of a few weeks made creating the experience much more managable, however the inner workings of the game wound up being much more troublesome than first anticipated.

Point and click games rely on a few elements done right in order to work to their proper potential. Interactivity, the ability to click on things to inspect them, Intuition, the ability to solve problems to progress the game in a way that feels natural, and Inventory, an almost Chekhov's gun situation, in which the player is able to find items early to help them later, or that may even just offer insight, in a way, it's a more mechanical extension of interactivity. Admittedly, I didn't need the triple I thing going on, I just thought it was neat. I, personally, had little involvement in the inventory side of the game. My two domains were interactivity, and the UI/UX around it, and the dialogue systems. We took a very stylized approach to the UI for 2 main reasons, scope, and clarity. Using 2D elements for interactable objects made the game much easier to make, drastically shortening the time needed to find what we need, and it was much easier to find public domain assets of the items we needed. It also enabled a greater sense of clarity. Players in point and click games often simply wave their mouse around until they highlight something, or, click on things repeatedly to see if they'd work. With no time for lengthy play testing sessions, we circumvented this issue by simply making interactable assets stand out. The proccess here was simple. We would take the asset to photoshop, duplicate and expand the image, then put a white stroke around the top image and a pattern overlay on the bottom image. This managed to achieve an effect similar to stickers on paper, almost as though they had been ripped straight from a book. This visual clarity led to relatively few issues of the player knowing what they could and couldn't interact with, and made the game more accessible, even at a glance.

The more difficult task in the project for me was the dialogue system. My goal was to create a flexible system that was capable of playing unique audio on each panel, changing the portrait on each panel, and change depending on context, for example, denying you if you had a key, and allowing you if you had a key. However, much of this didn't come to pass. Looking back now, I believe I could make these changes, however the end system implemented was much more fickle and rigid. The system instead looks for a scriptable object to call dialogue from, this scriptable object contains dialogue for each panel, the name of the interacted object,an audio source, and a portrait of the object. To call these scriptable objects, we simply attached them to buttons overlayed onto the screen above the object the player could interact with, and changed the canvas each scene. This works, mostly, aside from one event within the game, when John the chimp kills Archie, the scientist. Because of the limitations of my system, this is handled with 3 seperate buttons. It also caused some headaches through developement. However, this system could be made much better by simply calling the names, portraits and audio sources from the scriptable objects in the same way each dialogue is called. A very obvious fix in hindsight, but what isn't? The actual UI itself takes inspiration from Persona 5's UI. The name and portrait of each item interacted with goes a ways for clarity. It's also stylish and user friendly.

Primitive Resentment was something of a sobering experience, that even seemingly simple games must be well designed, and thought out in advance. Despite the steps we took to reduce the scope of the game for the short time frame, it still required quiet a bit of designing to get to it's current state, a state that despite its flaws, and the technical faults that annoy me to no end, I am proud of, and something I wouldn't hesitate to say I worked on.