At a Glance
At a Glance
Embedded Files
8 Months - Team of 2
Pawsabilities is a short visual-novel styled game meant to explore the resources and responsibilities of college students with learning disabilities. It is specifically tailored to the experience at Montserrat College of Art, in its setting and the reasoning for certain class concerns (art classes of 3 hour periods, skill sets expected of students, etc).
Initial design was modular, allowing us to complete 2/4 of the stories and leave the remainder in the hands of the school's Academic Access Studio to seek other students to "complete" the work. (Sadly, to my knowledge, this was never done. Considering the greater world concerns in 2020, I think we can agree that's ok, though.)
This project was done in collaboration with another student, Anya, who handled all the gorgeous artwork for the game, and the guidance of Meg Grant, Montserrat's Director for the Academic Access Studio.
Design and Implementation
Design and Implementation
My work on this project consisted of:
My work on this project consisted of:
Proposed initial project design and scope to the Academic Access Studio for approval
Led weekly progress meetings
Implemented mechanics using visual scripting in Construct 3
Designed narrative for sectioned stories and manner in which to break up relevant information
Wrote basic dialogue and revised based on feedback from peers
Final packaging and set up of itch.io account and page for the school, and transferring log-ins to the Academic Access Studio as delivery.
Hallway Visuals
Hallway Visuals
A very wide map made us a good hallway, that does somewhat resemble the hallway's to Montserrat's Hardie Building, with seating at one end and printers in the middle. Don't tell anyone Meg's office is in a completely different building, though~
Hallway Construct Code Snippet
Hallway Construct Code Snippet
A paired event sheet to this area lets us use simple bools to determine where in the story the player is, and toggle on or off the fellow students you see, as well as open and close the doors to allow entry. We even have the conversations with other characters (and the printer) included here.
This is an unoptimized way to do things, but it got us off the ground!
Retrospective Notes
Retrospective Notes
Focusing on visual coding and writing without art made this far less stressful than the work on The Road Diverged, despite them being at roughly the same time
The choice for modular designs really helped us complete the designs we focused on without panicking over the others-- and seemed to help each area be less of an info-dump
One of the biggest struggles with coding this project came from the narrative branches:
In part, Construct 3 wasn't something I knew how to create variables in easily, so as you can see in the screenshots, text is often set based on a check for "Text is ___," which copies over the entire line of text. This meant if a text line was changed, I also needed to ensure any sentences that came into this were looking for the right text post-change
This was primarily managed by drafting conversations in Google Sheets/Excel, where I could "automate" a reminder of the text that was needed by calling directly to the cell that was listed above the current one.
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