This week I decided to prototype a new narrative system for Lily’s Garden using Twine. After deciding the right problem statement, which is:
How can we engage more the Players more interested in the story, rewarding every effort they make to reach better outcomes during the puzzle part?
I passed to generate a lot of ideas on my notebook. Then I filtered out the best of them.
Ideas classification
Now it’s time to map the ideas in a proper chart. The X axis will represent the engagement, the metric to improve. Engagement is measured with session length and average sessions per day. Those are the KPIs.
![](https://paolos.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/xEngagement.png)
On the Y axis consider the motivation to stay longer and open the game more during the day. This article by The Games Refinery will help us.
![](https://paolos.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/casual-player-motivations-768x396-1.png)
The two main motivational drivers for this genre are Mastery and Expression. So that we have two possible charts to map out the outcome of our brainstorming.
![](https://paolos.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Maps-1024x438.png)
I classify the ideas in both those maps and see if we spot something in common. Usually this process is a team process and takes time and discussion. Again, in my case is just a quick exercise.
![](https://paolos.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/mapmastery.png)
Against mastery we can see that we have 3 possible ideas to build:
- Choose your Story: creating and using special tiles/power-ups during the puzzle match, you get points to invest in story branches.
- Day Perks: Once a Day ends according to what you used you can get extra rewards (boosters, power-ups, infinite lives, ingots)
- Rewards Missions: playing the game and performing positive actions such as buy lives, get extra movements, return every day, you unlock a special currency which can be converted in boosters and power-ups.
![](https://paolos.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/mapexpression.png)
Mapping ideas with expression in mind, a single idea is in the hot spot.
We have then selected our main idea: Choose your Story. Secondary ideas: Day Perks and Rewards Missions. On this base we can build our prototype!
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