Attachment Issues

Group Project | 2D Space Puzzle Game

The Project and Goal

Attachment Issues is a puzzle adventure game that lets you explore space while getting to know various creatures. You can even craft things to help your new friends!

You play as Glorb the space-cat, using your crafting machine to craft objects that help to solve all kinds of problems. The experience relies on experimentation and curious players who want to try new solutions.

This project was my graduation project at HKU Games, where I graduated as a game designer in July 2024. I was the only one writing code and implementing everything within Unity. This proved quite the challenge, but in the end, I managed to create a polished and playable demo.

The goal for this project was to create a game that would evoke a feeling of wonder within the player while getting them to experiment with the mechanics.

To achieve this, I researched the feeling of wonder and the drive to experiment to see how other people had defined the word. From this research, I concluded my own working definitions.

Defining Wonder and Experimentation

As the definition of Wonder was a bit vague to me at first, I looked at what other people had written about it. In the end, the definition of Wonder that Brené Brown defined in the book "Atlas of the Heart" was the one I took most of my inspiration from. At the end of my research, I ended up with these two working definitions to use during the project:

Wonder is the passion to learn and discover new things.

Experimentation is using trail-and-error while applying different mechanics that combine actions to create new possibilities.

Process

To be able to see what parts worked within my design and what parts didn't, I created success criteria for both the feeling of wonder and the goal of getting players to experiment. For wonder, the following two. Firstly, players should feel in control of all their actions within the game. Secondly, players should create their own goals.

For experimentation, the following three. First, players should try out different combinations within the crafting system in the game. Second, players should test the effect of the rope on different objects within the game. Lastly, players should give multiple items to various NPCs.

During the rest of the process, I tested multiple times with these success criteria to see how I was doing and if the design was working as intended. This helped me a lot to keep all design work facing the same direction. As there was a lot of freedom within the project to do whatever I wanted, using these criteria as a guide to make design decisions helped a lot and kept me focused on the player instead of myself.

Credits

Bart van Lierop - Game Design, Game Dev
Nikki Hordijk - Game Design, Game Art
Tom de Laak - Sound Effects
Tim Schippers - Music

Dialogue powered by Yarn Spinner

User Testing

During the process, I made multiple Prototypes to test all the different mechanics in the game. In Prototype 1 I focused on the movement of the player character. How does it feel to float trough space? Do people experiment already? These were the questions I was trying to answer.

With the movement feeling good and players already playing around with things like big rocks colliding with the rope, I moved on to the second prototype. Here I added more mechanics such as the crafting system and dialogue.

These new mechanics need a bit more work, mostly because players started to question the point of it all. So in the third prototype I worked on creating these goals. Mostly by adding characters that needed help but also by rewarding players with a bigger rope for example.

This third prototype I tested at Anime Con, where I got a ton of useful feedback from a lot of people.

Prototype 1

Prototype 2

Prototype 3

Anime Con

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