Don Don

Our journey with Sony Talent League has come to a close (at least, until we meet again in Spain!), and we’d like to take this moment to share our reflections on this experience. Before we get into it, we’d first like to extend our congratulations to Team Djossi for their well-deserved victory, as well as to the other finalists. All of you have inspired and motivated us throughout this journey with your talent and hard work. We look forward to being continuously inspired by you and we can’t wait to meet you in Barcelona. 

 

It’s hard to encapsulate this ten week experience into one succinct post. The journey consisted of a lot of trial and error and moments where the feeling of anxiety persisted, but there was also a lot of learning, a lot of growth, and a lot of friendship. 

 

Interestingly, I first learned about Sony Talent League a year ago. At the time, I had never thought about applying because it was outside of my comfort zone. Flash forward to a year later, and I had just returned home after working abroad at a VFX studio in Montreal. I wasn’t sure what was next for me, but I recall a conversation I had with the lady sitting next to me on the plane ride home. She’s retired now, but her career had many twists and turns, and she advised me to be excited rather than anxious about what was to come. With that mindset, I wanted to be open to new opportunities and I wanted to learn as much as possible. Seeing Sony Talent League pop up in my emails felt like a sign, and I remember calling Ephan and saying, “Hey, would it be crazy if we applied for this?” 

 

We began our journey with Sony Talent League with open minds, ready to absorb as much knowledge as we could about games and the games industry, and we hoped to use that knowledge in order to better ourselves as artists and as people. Our game, as many of you know, was inspired by my parents and my desire to connect with them on a deeper level. Throughout the mentorship, we wanted to create a game that would best deliver this experience, not just for me and my parents, but to other people who also struggle with language barriers. I believe the most challenging part of our journey was figuring out the game mechanics which went through many, many rounds of changes and iterations. Looking back, if we were to do things differently, I think we would spend a good amount of time in the beginning discussing our games’ core values, drafting the game design document, and essentially, just building a solid foundation for our game. I’d also say taking more time in the UX aspect of the game would have been beneficial, for instance doing more UX research and figuring out the user (gameplay) experience in more detail from the get-go. 

 

Our mentors were fantastic and we’re so, so thankful for them. They gave us advice, guided us, were patient with us, and reassured us. Andrew, Kevin, Sonja, Harvey, and Daryl–thank you all so much for your time and the guidance you’ve given us. We’re so appreciative of you all, and we look up to you all so much. We hope that one day our paths will cross again!

Sony Talent League was an unforgettable experience and it has been amazing to be a part of such a supportive and welcoming community. We wanted to create an experience that will help bring people together in a fun way. It’s what Don Don represents, and I think our game managed to capture that pretty well. Towards the end of this project, my parents entered retirement, and a part of their time will now be spent playing Don Don haha. I also want to say how proud I am of Ephan. His commitment and dedication to our game is something I’ll never forget. Though he’s not a programmer, he developed our game and it looks pretty darn good if I say so myself! It’s time to sign off now, but it’s not a goodbye, but a “see you later”. We look forward to seeing everyone in Barcelona. Until next time!

 

P.S.: The game’s name “Don Don” is my Chinese nickname. It’s what my Dad calls me. My Chinese name is 安安 (translates to peace) and is pronounced “On On” similar to how “On” or “We” is pronounced in French, as in “On y va!” So, on that note, I’d like to close this post with: 

 

On y va, Don Don! 

加油, Don Don!

Let’s go, Don Don! 

  

We’re back again for another rundown of our weekly progress. It’s really ramping up in the dev room right now and we’re excited to share our progress with you.

We had a number of final mentor sessions with some of our mentors so we were eager to get as much info and feedback out of them as possible. With Harvey, we spoke to him about our feedback system and how we can make that more interesting as well as how to make sure the mechanics are repeatable as well as fun. With Daryl, we talked about the UI elements in the game and how we can make the next required action really clear for the user. With Andrew, we discussed the presentation and how we can express the lighthearted/fun tone of the game effectively. We spoke to all of our mentors about the different concepts for our logo and player selection screens. We are drawn to the idea of using speech bubbles for the design but will try to find a way to make it look less like a messaging application.

We have been continuing with the development in Unity. Focusing on small interactions in a variety of levels that will be shown in the demo. We have updated the UI elements to show more personality and fun and have changed the font to showcase this too. We have also been adding more to our feedback system by adding sparkle particle effects and sounds when you input an acceptable word.

We have also been creating builds for the WebGL format so that we can easily share our project and have people test our game. It’s been fascinating seeing our game on different devices and it is a very proud feeling to see someone playing with a game we’ve made. 

This week, we're going to focus on the presentation and make some minor improvements to our game. We’ll have one more mentor session which will be with Kevin. I can’t believe we’re already heading into the final week! We want to do our best and finish strong. Thank you to all of our mentors and advisors who helped us get this far. We can’t wait to share our project with all of you! 

Ephan and Gina 

 

We’re now on the home stretch! Team Don Don has been hard at work and we’re prepared to finish strong.

 

We had amazing sessions this week with Sonja, Andrew, Kara, and Kevin and we learned so much from each of them! In our session with Sonja, we talked about our visuals and simplifying them–which we’ll apply as we create our new levels (Which we’ll explain later in this diary!) With Andrew, we talked about our game mechanics. As mentioned in the previous diary, we were initially going to build a bridge level with the primary mechanic being dragging or tapping phrases. Andrew suggested incorporating more of that drag and drop object goodness, which is what we’re planning on doing now! We also had a meeting with Kara where we went over our project timeline, and we’re still on track to finish on time–whew! And in our final session of week 8, we had a great chat with Kevin and talked about our game’s core pillars, as well as something that I feel really stuck with us–creating the 20% to showcase the 80% (hope I remembered that correctly). But that catalyzed us into rethinking things, and with the combination of Andrew’s advice, I thought: let’s build a bunch of different levels, but not to their entirety. Let’s just build the parts that we’ll need to showcase in our video pitch, so we’ll have snippets of each level to show a better representation of what our game looks like! 

 

So, yup! We’ve adjusted our schedule to accommodate this, but I really do feel like it will help us explain our vision better! And, we are on track to finish on time, which is great. 

 

As a little reflection moment, Ephan and I have learned sooooo much so far! In the process of making a game, we learned a lot about design, mechanics, feedback systems, sound, project management, the list goes on! Earlier in the mentorship sessions, we were asked what kind of inspirations we had for our game, and we said that we really liked and wanted to have the story inspired by the film, “Everything, Everywhere All at Once.” Funnily enough, our game didn’t end up being like the movie, however the process sure felt like everything, everywhere, all at once! (Apologies, Ephan and I both enjoy bad puns, and dad jokes). This project has just made me have even more respect for people who work in the games industry.

 

So, what have we been working on and what will we be focusing on for this upcoming week? We’ve finished writing the first draft of our video pitch’s script and will finalize the script, record, and start editing the video this week. We have also been building those levels for our video pitch, and are planning on finishing those this week. As we mentioned earlier, we really want to showcase our game so we’ll be showing different types of things you can drag and drop, such as words to restore an object, phrases, or actions like hugging a NPC to calm them down. We’re also planning on incorporating a little tutorial walkthrough in our video to explain the mechanics and how the game works. All in all, we can’t believe it’s our final week of mentorships this week and we’re ready to finish strong!! LET’S GO DON DON!!

 

Best,

Gina and Ephan

Hello! Team Don Don here. Now that we’re heading into week 8, let’s do a recap of week 7! 

 

Mentor Sessions:

During our mentor sessions this week, we received valuable feedback. With Daryl, we explored important aspects of our game, including its style, UI/readability, and camera angle. We also discussed potential publishers and investors for our project. In our session with Harvey, we discussed the feedback system–since the primary mechanic of our game is the drag and drop/tap mechanic, we want to ensure that we perfect its game feel/juice.

 

Story:

We also really honed in on our story, the characters, and the overall plot. So the story follows Anna, and her journey to recovering her lost memories and finding her way back home. Along the way, players will learn key phrases about human connection from the characters they meet. When Anna returns home, she must confront her past and the people she left behind using the phrases she’s learned throughout her journey. 

Building the Demo:

We chose a middle level as our demo since we felt that it was a good representation of our game as a whole. For context, in the previous level, Anna (the protagonist) and Ken (her guide) have gotten into an argument. This level begins with them standing at opposite ends of a bridge with missing planks in the middle. The objective is to restore the planks by selecting the correct phrases as well as restoring objects. Once the bridge has been restored, they have also bridged their reconnection. Below the bridge lies a river, and to help drive the level’s progression, we’re thinking of incorporating fog that will slowly lift as players choose the correct answers, eventually revealing the characters’ reflections at the end, adding to the symbolism of the game. 

 

Mechanics:

Our game mechanics include a drag and drop object restoration system that will reveal clues about Anna's past. We're also thinking of ways to integrate teaching phrases into the gameplay, and while we're currently considering having players tap the correct phrase in response to Ken or other characters’ dialogue, we're still exploring other options to improve this idea. We've also been working on the feedback system for the drag and drop/tap mechanic. We’ve implemented/are going to implement a subtle screen shake, sound effects and character animations for correct/incorrect answers, and light sparkles when an answer is correct.

 

Next Steps:

This week, we’ll continue building our level demo in Unity, which will include working on the feedback system, character animations, and sound effects. We’ll also finalize the script for the level and make artistic changes from our current prototype to a more polished look for the demo. This week was a great week for us as we really established certain features of the game and we were able to visualize the level more clearly. We're excited to keep it up. Here’s to week 8!

 

Yours truly,

Gina and Ephan :) 

Hey everyone! Over the past week, we’ve been hard at work trying to create the narrative of our game and thinking about how it ties in with our gameplay. We are beginning to develop the levels in Unity using the mechanics we created in our prototypes. We also had some useful sessions with our mentors which helped us to identify the next steps for our project.

 

In Unity, we are building our level according to the user flow we created. We are creating an environment that will contain a number of missing objects that the user will need to restore by dragging in the correct translations. We’re trying to find a way to lay out the words in a clear and accessible way. We are also considering how the objects that need to be restored can be used to illustrate the narrative and theme of the game which is connection and communication.

 

In our meeting with Kevin, we discussed how users can test this game conveniently. We believe that building our project for WebGL may be preferable as it would be easier to share this with other potential testers. We also discussed what the build for our deliverable will be, which is where we discovered we needed to make some changes. As neither I nor Gina have access to a Mac, we couldn’t build for iOS. This means that our final deliverable for STL will be developed for Android tablets instead.

 

In our meeting with Sonja, we learnt a lot about the industries she’s worked in and the professional practices adopted by different types of companies. Hearing about how smaller companies distribute work got us to consider our own distribution of work as a two-person team. 

 

Daryl gave a very useful presentation about pitch decks and showed us great examples that showcased important topics to cover such as: 

• Explaining the core gameplay loop. 
• Highlighting the gap in the market for our game.
• Creating a moodboard to present the theme and inspirations for the game. 
• And much more useful topics!

 

The plan, for now, is to continue developing the levels for the game and tying in the narrative with the mechanics to create an engaging experience for both players. We are excited to be at this stage of the project where the development process ramps up and we’re excited to share our journey with you. Until next time. Thanks for reading!

 

Hiya! Don Don here to present to you our weekly recap. On this fine Monday morning, we’ll be discussing Week 5. Can you believe that we’re already more than halfway through STL? I seriously can’t. Time is flying. 

 

Week 5 was a bit of a crazy, but pivotal week for Ephan and I. We started off the week continuing to prototype and build our puzzle-based, escape room game in Unity. I won’t go into too much detail of how this game worked since we scrapped it, but essentially it was a split screen on one device. The two players were in different rooms and what one player did in their room affected the other player’s room. For instance, player one turning on a light switch might turn on the lamp in player two’s room which would then reveal a clue. 

 

While coming up with the puzzles, we realized this may not be the best genre for our co-op language learning game. The puzzles would be where we’d incorporate the language learning, but it was quite restrictive because we could only teach so much through one puzzle. Not to mention, coming up with language puzzles that involved two players speaking a different language and somehow working together was incredibly difficult. That, and because this wasn’t the most efficient way to teach a language in a game… we went back to the drawing board.

 

This was a pretty frustrating time for Ephan and I. We felt like we were falling behind schedule. We asked ourselves what the biggest problems to solve might be. 

 

1. What if the two players have zero knowledge of each other’s language? 
2. If that’s the case, how will they communicate?
3. If they can’t communicate, how will they work together… in this co-op game? 

 

Solution: Language exchange partners require the two to at least have a basic knowledge of each others’ language to hold a basic conversation. So, for our game (which is essentially for language exchange partners) they too must possess a basic knowledge of each others’ language.  

 

We came up with some ideas, including potentially using drawing as an alternative to communication. After our meeting with Andrew, we’ve decided on a new game: 

 

Objects are disappearing from this world! You and your partner will have to work together to restore these objects to the world. There will be word bubbles in Cantonese and English. Each object will be assigned to a language–you’ll have to work together, teach your friend what each object means and drag and drop to restore that object. 

 

We finished off the week with a hangout sesh with the other finalists. It was really nice to see how the other projects are doing and it was inspiring to hear them talk about what their projects meant to them. 

 

We’ve started developing our new game and will continue to prototype and develop throughout this week. We’ll be implementing the game mechanics such as drag and drop, and character dialogue for instance. It has been a learning experience, but we’re so glad to be at this stage and we’re looking forward to this chapter of our project! See you in the next recap. :) 

 

Yours truly,

 

Gina and Ephan

 

Hey everyone! Last week was a very fun week for both of me and Gina. We got to continue developing Unity/Figma prototypes and received some great advice from our mentors. It was also a week where we challenged the way we developed ideas.  

 

We also remembered that we wanted to work more efficiently so we decided to try out some cool assets from the Unity store. We were really amazed by the amount of useful content on there and will continue to see how it can facilitate our workflow.   

 

In our meeting with Kevin, he got us thinking about the different mediums and tools we can use to keep track of our ideas and got us to make a mind map that contained just about any potential idea we could think of for our project. We realised it's a good tool for storytelling and created mind maps related to story/character development. Kevin also explained to us the benefits of tablets with split-screen as a medium for our playable demo before expanding to other platforms.

 

Our meeting with Sonja got us to consider our plans for user testing, who our audience would be and thinking about where we can source some precious test dummies! We talked a lot about how we could create a fun cooperative experience and what our priorities should be if we were unable to complete everything we set out for.

 

We also had a great session with Scot Stafford where he outlined the importance of sound and music to facilitate storytelling and expressing emotions. He also introduced us to the idea of ducking which is about the adjustment of audio levels to prioritise certain sounds.

 

As for now, we’re going to continue prototyping and try to move ahead in the development process. Maintaining a fluid workflow has been difficult at times due to our time difference but we are trying to find solutions and compromises that give us the opportunity to work together efficiently.

 

We’re going to try and enjoy this experience and we’re looking forward to the upcoming week! Until next time. Thanks for reading!

Happy Monday! Let’s talk a bit about week three, shall we? 

 

This week, Ephan and I had our mentor sessions with Andrew, Harvey, and Daryl as well as a project management session with Kara and our first Tribe Advisors session with (~twenty!!) advisors who gave us helpful and insightful feedback. We pitched our ideas in regards to our game mechanics to our mentors and advisors, and with each feedback, Ephan and I continued to iterate. Here’s what we learned this week:

 

We’re doing too much. 

 

Ephan and I spent the majority of this week racking our heads trying to come up with an idea that married the elements of co-op, language learning, and connection together in a balanced way. We came up with tons of ideas but nothing was sticking. Spoiler alert: our problem was that we had thought too much about the language learning component in a way that was sacrificing the co-op elements, and really, the initial idea. 

 

I thought about how I had initially pitched this project, and our game was never supposed to be a stand-alone language learning game (like Duolingo)–it was supposed to be more of a supplement to support language learning. And more than that, it was supposed to be a game that connected you and somebody you loved or cared for. It was supposed to be a game that me and my mom would enjoy playing together. It’s a bilingual game where you each possess the skills the other doesn’t have (player A knowing one language, and player B knowing the other), and work together with your unique skills to solve puzzles together.

 

Ephan and I had been focusing so much on the language learning element that we were going down the road of what seemed like a Duolingo 2.0. So who’s Don Don? Don Don is a co-op, and that gives you the opportunity to collaborate–and connect. You’ll work together to solve and decipher puzzles where the clues are written in both Cantonese and English. Since the clues are bilingual, you’ll have to explain/teach each other (and therefore, learn). Hopefully that makes sense, but we found it interesting that this is essentially what we had in mind in the beginning and also includes the ideas our mentor Andrew suggested to us back in week one. I guess we got too in our heads about the language learning elements, so this is a nice little learning moment. Please bear with us, haha.  

 

We’ve started prototyping in Unity the mechanics, and in Figma the UI. The game will be like those escape rooms, where you examine objects in the room for clues to solve puzzles. Now that we’ve figured out who Don Don is, and who she isn’t, we’re really excited to move forward.

 

This week we’ll continue prototyping, mapping the user flow/journey map, building the story/narrative, and level design. We’re looking forward to week 4. Let’s go Don Don!

 

Yours truly,

Gina and Ephan 

 

This week has been a little difficult but informative. After receiving feedback from our lovely mentors me and Gina have continued to work on researching game mechanics. It has been a challenge to re-evaluate our game and define it once and for all but we feel like we’re getting closer and are remaining positive.

 

Talking to the mentors was amazing! Before the meeting I know I was a little scared to meet all our mentors at once but they were really calming and insightful. They really gave us a lot of necessary feedback to improve our project and got us re-considering important questions like…

 

What platform are we going to use?

Should the mechanics be decided before the narrative? (Spoiler! Yes)

What art style appeals to a large age demographic?

 

And these are just some of the thought-provoking questions they gave us.

 

So for this week, we decided to take their advice and try and get those pesky game mechanics sorted! “How?” you might ask. By doing the best research possible and playing a lot of games. Me and Gina played a variety of co-op games like ‘It Takes Two’ and after we decided mobile was our preferred platform, we looked into Android/iOS games for inspiration. This was incredibly fun and gave us a lot of great references.   

 

As we’re learning more about our project, we’re continuing to refine our work plan and are keeping up to date with our tasks thanks to our project management system Jira. 

 

What we’re working on/what’s not working

 

• Establishing co-op game mechanics

 

How we’re feeling 

 

• I’m excited and eager to start creating but there has been a little bit of frustration as we continue to decide on the mechanics. We don’t want to rush it but we also don’t want to fall behind so we’re trying to establish the right balance. 

 

• I think the meeting with the mentors has highlighted the importance of discussion and I plan on asking questions whenever possible to mentors and fellow/previous finalists to learn from their workflow and to build a support network. 

 

• I think the upcoming tribe advisor’s meeting will be a great opportunity for more useful feedback and I can’t wait to meet everyone there!

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading!

What a week! Ephan and I had a very hectic, but insightful week. We dedicated this time to researching and settling into our new journey!

 

Our main goal for this week was figuring out our game mechanics. Our game is a co-op where player 1 is learning English, and player 2 is learning Cantonese, so we wanted to think about a way we could do this where it was still fun and engaging. We were brainstorming solutions on how to integrate game mechanics with our narrative/story and language learning elements seamlessly.

 

We researched and looked into videos on YouTube and articles online. We looked into what game mechanics are, looked at similar games and made bullet points of what we liked about each of them, looked into language learning techniques (we particularly liked Stephen Krashen’s theory on language acquisition–how it’s more effective for people to learn a language via visual cues or context and we plan on implementing his strategies into our game).

 

We also thought about our story and fleshed out more of our characters. I found Coursera’s CalArts: Story and Narrative Development for Video Games to be extremely helpful. The course talked about strategies for creating ideas (the game goals, protagonists/antagonists, levels ideas) and gave examples on character briefs and what a game synopsis could look like. It mentioned that a story should have a spine–which is the primary theme of the story, and rising action, and that a story can be split into three acts–the set up, confrontation, and resolution. This was all really helpful while ideating our story.

 

We also had a very insightful session with Andrew! We pitched our current story to him, and he suggested making the game’s value to be about teaching/reminding players the value of communication and how it helps people feel seen. We both really found this helpful in coming up with our story, and making sure that new ideas tied in with our theme.

 

We also defined our deliverable. In our session with Kevin, he mentioned the idea of a “vertical slice of cake,” which was helpful, and also made Ephan hungry. We told Andrew that we plan on having a playable demo where players can get a sense of the game mechanics, story, and value. 

 

This week, we also started hammering down our work plan. Tasks will definitely change as our journey progresses, and there will definitely be a lot of iterations and back-and-forth, but currently I’ve divided our time into 3 periods: pre-production (planning), production (the art needed for the minimum viable product), and “post-production” (basically making all the art pretty, like adding textures and potentially VFX). 

 

We believe we’ve figured out our game mechanics and have a story going, which we’re looking forward to sharing with you tomorrow for feedback. 

 

How we’re feeling:

 

Gina: I’m feeling slightly overwhelmed haha. There’s a lot of information to process and a lot of stuff to work out, but it’s understandable at this early stage. I’m not much of a gamer–at least, not anymore. I used to be obsessed with MapleStory (if anyone else here is a Mapler…let me know) but now I mainly just play Mario Kart haha. I learned a lot about games this past week and was surprised how much decision making went into it! The game mechanics, narrative design, UI, sound–everything pieces together into one cohesive theme. I feel like I’m learning a lot about games, and it’s exciting because at the same time, I get to apply it into practice for this project while being mentored by industry experts! I’m also looking forward to getting to know the other finalists better, and meeting everyone in-person in Spain! Although this journey will definitely come with its own set of challenges, I’m so excited to learn & grow and work on Don Don with my best friend!!  

 

Ephan: I felt a bit surprised to see the direction of our concept slightly shift as we learnt more about game design, language learning and narrative writing. I am also really excited to develop some of the concepts that we discussed. I believe we’ve created a really fun story with interesting mechanics. I’m a little nervous but excited to receive feedback from our mentors tomorrow so we can really fine-tune our project.

 

–

 

Phew! Hopefully that wasn't too much haha. That's all for now. We'll see you soon! :)