Rae Ruilin Huang - Round & Again

Round & Again

An immersive online social deduction game, in which the the goal is to find out the killer.

BACKGROUND & RULE OF THE GAME

"Round & Again" is a multi-player immersive online social deduction game, which provides players clues of the killer through spacial sound. When a player enter the game, he or she could use W A S D keys to move around, and drag around mouse on the screen to change perspectives. Players will be notified of their identities (ordinary people or killer). A random person will be assigned as the killer and the killer's identity will remain confidential. Before the night started, ordinary people will be asked to choose if they want to use a special medicine that will prevent them from being killed and turned them into the killer if they happened to be killed that night. Each ordinary people only have 1 medicine throughout the entire game.

At night, when ordinary people are back to their assigned room, killer can physically go into a player's room to kill. Killer has 50 seconds to complete the kill before going back to the room. The killer will win the game if his or her identity can remain as a secrete until the end of the game.

TEAM (ROLE)

Rae Ruilin Huang (Game designer)
Yongkun Li (Developer)

TOOL

Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Unity

DURATION

2020 November - December (Game Design and the Psychology of Choice, 2020 Spring - NYU ITP)

Footage from the latest playtest

If you would like to get a feel of the game and the sound design, go ahead and download the game here! Note that this game will only run on Mac OS computers, and you do need a set of headphones to hear the spatial sound. If you are one of the many who would want to play test the game and help us be better, please contact me at rh.rae68@gmail.com We are still working to improve the game and your feedback means a lot to us.

Download Round & Again

Design process

Ideate & Testing

As Yongkun and I were brainstorming for the final project of "Game Design and the Psychology of Choice", we felt deeply inspired by the game Mafia (Werewolf), a social deduction game created by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986 that is still popular among people until today. While Mafia were often played in person, the COVID 19 has prevented us from being physically together so that our class had to play it through Zoom video call. While the game was still exciting, I felt that playing it virtually wasn't as exciting as in person. When being physically together and when it's time for the wolfs to make a kill at night, everyone would hold their breath and seek for most trivial sound to look for the potential wolf suspect. The sound effect in virtual environment, however, is missing due to the lack of spatial sound.

While most game are about what the player sees, Yongkun and I wanted to try to our ears to play an essential role in the game we designed. After brainstorming and consolidating on an idea, we came up with a physical game play plan to examine the rules and logic before going too far on developing the game on Unity. I invited my roommate to play-test the game with me since they were the only group of people that I can see without wearing a mask during quarantine. I asked Yongkun to be the judge by connecting with him over Zoom.

The following is the judge's script. It should also serve to help you understand the process of the game better:

- Explain rules. Everyone draws a card from the deck and tells the judge their number. The judge decides who's the killer and who are the ordinary people.

- Everyone comes to the judge privately and judge will let the person knows he/her role by typing these in a shared screen note:

- Number X, your role is the ordinary person

- Number X, your role is the killer. And your killing sequence is __, __, __

- Everyone goes back to their sit

Judge says:

- “Ok, everyone close your eyes. “

- “For the ordinary people, if you feel like you will be killed by the killer, you can choose to use your medicine by raising your hand. Keep in mind that you only have 1 medicine throughout the entire game.”

- Judge says: “Ok the ordinary people, you may now put your hand down.

- “Killer please open your eyes. Once I start counting, you will have 1minute to kill an ordinary person by walking behind that person and raising your hand. You may start now” (Play music to cover some small sound & Start countdown clock )

- “Morning. Everyone you may now open your eyes. Yesterday, __ died. You may now start analyzing who’s the killer and vote this person out”

The Killer is raising hand behind the victim to symbolize the decision of "kill"

Refinement of the game

After playtesting the game physically, we confirmed that the basic logic of the game make sense and that we need to make sure that the game will end way too soon if we only have 4 players.

With the feedbacks, we revised the rule of the game started building the game. Transforming the in person game into a computer version wasn't easy. For the limited amount of time, I came up with a couple different development plans and minimized the amount of things that weren't essential to be developed for our next play-testing in 1 week. Yongkun and I decided on to use Zoom call for players to discuss the potential killer instead of building an audio function in the game.

After I passed the wireframe, mood-board, prototype, and visual elements to Yongkun, he started building the game in Unity.

2ND, 3RD, 4TH PLAY TEST

In 2 weeks, we managed to invite 18 players with different level of video game and in-person game experiences to test if the design of the game was easy to understand and fun for both the sophisticated masters of Mafia and the first time players.

By play-testing the game multiple times, we found many bugs and places that needed to be fixed and improved. Here are what they were and the solutions.

1. Player could peek from a gap between the door and the wall to observe who's the killer >>> Solution: fix the bug

2. The first person who got killed the first night feel board

There were also few things need to be improved by reconsidering the design of the game:

1. Killer is lack of control. The role feels like a tool since the sequence of killing is pre decided. Can change it so that there is a range that the killer can choose from.

2. Has to be more than 6 people to play it.

3. Need to limit the amount of time that killer have to make the game more exciting.

Based on feedbacks and our observations, we solved bugs and made few changes to the game. Here are some screenshots from the game and play testing.