ORIGINS

OBJECTIVE

ReEntry: Fresh Start is one of two transformational games in the “ReEntry” series. They’re made to help justice-involved citizens (people who have had interactions with the criminal justice system, primarily through police, courts, or the corrections system) practice crucial skills needed to successfully reenter society.

According to the key subject matter expert (SME) on this project, principal researcher for Marquis Software Charise Hastings, Ph.D., during incarceration there is no decision making. It is the opposite, decisions are explicitly taken away. For someone who has been incarcerated over a long period of time, this proves to be challenging when asked to make decisions in order to reintegrate back into society.

The primary goals were to create an experience in which players could practice:
-- Decision making
-- Time Management
-- Perseverance

To accomplish this goal, the client and SME proposed that we iterate on two games in Simcoach Games' “JobPro” series, JobPro: Get Prepared! and JobPro: My Life.

Understanding these two games will give more perspective into the design behind ReEntry: Fresh Start.

JOBPRO: GET PREPARED

Jobpro: Get Prepared! is a life sim in which players try to land a job at “The Company.” To accomplish this, they need to maximize their level of preparedness and minimize their stress level all while racing against the clock. It’s intended to help young adults think about what they might do before a job interview to increase their chances of getting hired.

The game is from the point of view of the player as they travel to different locations in the city. Locations are populated with actions that can be performed only in that location. These actions are represented by buttons that exist in an appropriate place in the environment. The player presses an action button and is given a description of the action that they’ll perform. Each action can affect preparedness and stress. All tasks cost time. 

For example, if the player wants to brush their teeth then they need to travel to the bathroom. Once in the bathroom they can look near the sink to find their toothbrush. Above it is a button with an icon of a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste. When pressed, a window pops up with an image and two buttons. One button performs the action and the other cancels the action. If the player presses the “BRUSH TEETH” button then time advances 5 minutes, they gain 10 Preparedness, and gain 0 stress.

A game ends when the player arrives at their interview or when they miss the interview entirely. Afterward the player is presented with feedback about their professionalism. This includes punctuality, preparedness, and appearance.

The challenge and fun of the experience is found in trying to discover all of the content and using it to construct an optimal run in each scenario. Each scenario takes about five to ten minutes to complete.

The game isn’t without frustrating moments however. Here are some of the issues that were observed:

-- The order and timing of when you do things doesn’t seem to matter and when it does matter, it’s difficult to tell.
---- For example, the player can get dressed, brush their teeth, and groom the day before the interview but the game will still count these key actions as having been performed even though this wouldn’t be ideal in real life.

-- Optimal play doesn’t align with how you would probably want to behave in the real world. Because the game doesn’t penalize you for not sleeping, it’s a sound strategy to pull an all-nighter (something I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t do before most interviews) to maximize the number of actions that can be completed before the interview. The game also doesn’t check to see if a location is closed once you’re already there so it even becomes possible to do all-nighters at the public library.

-- The current state of the player isn’t presented to them.
---- For example, if the player gets dressed for the interview and then takes a shower, are they still wearing the interview clothes afterwards? There’s no way to tell besides going to the interview and finding out if you were.

-- An inconsistent travel interface can make it difficult to know what all of your options are. This is exacerbated by travel times to locations not being relative to each other.

-- Unskippable interface animations. After each action it takes three real-time seconds before another input can be made. The travel cutscene is even longer.

-- No way to quickly advance time so it can be frustrating to arrive at the interview a little too early and find that your only options for advancing time are to ride the bus back and forth or wait for several real-world minutes.

-- The game only has an instructions or ‘How to Play’ screen rather than an integrated tutorial so basic information is usually (and understandably) missed by players.

-- Unavoidable random events will ruin your run by consuming huge chunks of time. The power goes out so your alarm doesn’t go off, you fall asleep reading a book, or you spill coffee on yourself. They seem like helpful lessons that are better learned in a game than in real life, but they also erase the player’s desire to keep playing.

Overall the game is an easy-to-understand concept with some visual flair that can reward players with a helpful perspective if they’re willing to overlook and work through some of its quirks and design oversights. 

JOBPRO: MY LIFE

A short time after JobPro: Get Prepared! launched, an opportunity arose to work on a similar project. The client is a non-profit family center who helps high-risk teens. They wanted to find a more engaging way to help kids in their program think about and discuss the responsibilities they might have as adults such as getting to work on time and taking care of themselves.

We thought with some modifications that JobPro: Get Prepared! would provide a fun and impactful experience. These modifications included:

-- Expanding the length of a full game loop from one day to a week

-- Giving the player more well-defined professionalism points that represent Employability, Appearance, and Punctuality

-- Giving the player Social, Comfort, and Health points to gain and manage in addition to the professionalism points

-- Building out content and goals to drive the player through the seven days such as a part-time job, purchasing system, and a social event at the end of the week.

The mechanics are mostly identical to its predecessor, Get Prepared!, but the experience is drastically different. Time in the game world no longer progresses while the player is idle. As a result, time can only be moved forward through actions. If you are ten minutes early for an event then you need to find an action that will move time forward ten minutes. This was done to not penalize players who might need more time to read. However, this combined with the extended scope of living out an entire week leads to a full playthrough lasting over an hour on a player’s first completed attempt. Players now have a longer term goal but can end up with a lot of time in a world that seems to lack a fitting amount of meaningful decisions to use that time on. You might end up sleeping a little extra, walking instead of taking the bus, hanging out with your friends every night, and “surfing the web” to use up time.

This is the first project that I worked on solely as a designer. I joined the project when it was about 75% complete. My responsibility was to balance all of the actions, action cooldowns, and points earned from actions so that achieving three stars (the highest rank) in all categories was possible while playing in a way that aligns with the learning goal of being professional and taking care of yourself.

Here are some strengths and weaknesses of JobPro: My Life:

Strengths:
-- More direct consequences that help players feel like their actions in the world matter.
---- If you don’t eat food then you get hunger pangs and lose Health points.
---- If you don’t sleep then you might nod off randomly and lose time
---- If you don’t manage your money well then you might not be able to buy key items or use the bus

-- It’s straightforward to succeed at the main quest, but challenging to find all of the necessary actions to achieve three stars in each stat.

-- Two team members (Matt Denton and Alex Fox) made a great effort on their own to create and implement the restaurant serving minigame. It helps so much to add variety to the experience like this (and it’s cleverly tied to mechanics in the game such as bonus tips for playing well and a speed boost item that you can purchase.)

-- A tutorial is integrated into gameplay at the beginning of a new game. This is much more helpful than the instructions screen (which is still present here unfortunately.)

-- The player now travels to all locations using a map so that it’s less frustrating to plan where to go next.

-- Unfair random events have been removed from the experience.

Weaknesses
-- The points earned can be counterintuitive and misunderstood as a current “Status”
---- For example, rather than “Health” representing how the player character currently feels (maybe like ‘health points’ in other games), it's representing the value of healthy decisions made over the course of seven days.

-- Player statuses that can have impact during the seven days aren’t represented as clearly
---- For example, if a certain amount of time has passed since the player last ate then they’ll experience a health penalty, but there’s nothing in the game that indicates how hungry you currently are.

-- The interface for exploring and performing actions hasn’t been updated so the experience is needlessly slowed down and sometimes confusing.

-- The player can perform actions on their phone to pass more granular amounts of time but these frequently repeated actions are buried in the slow interface.

-- It was discovered through testing that a save system was necessary but its implementation began too late into the project for it to be built as intended.

-- Some point balancing oversights can encourage undesired behaviors. For example, the player is rewarded for calling into work late but not similarly rewarded for being early or on time. This rewards players for discovering this action but leads to an optimal strategy of always being late for work so that you can call in late.

In spite of some of the limitations, the roleplaying fantasy is realized so strongly that the game garnered positive praise as players lamented in store reviews that the game isn’t longer!

THE THIRD ITERATION

SUBJECT MATTER

With the thoughts detailed above in mind, we set out to improve upon the “JobPro” entries while integrating the new transformational goals. The subject matter experts, who were the catalyst for the project, were passionate and communicative. There was no shortage of information and questions were always answered patiently. They first (and most importantly) helped us understand who this game is for.


This summary that I wrote for the design doc based on our conversations reflects what they revealed to us:

We even got access to a demonstration of a simulation that was being used at the time to help justice-involved citizens. To participate, I printed out a worksheet that detailed my responsibilities as a person leaving incarceration, joined a Zoom call, and experienced the crushing reality of a game that’s unfair beyond all hope. The game was a roleplaying experience run by a game master in which players must choose randomly from a set of cards to try to complete items on their worksheet. Most cards would result in a catastrophe for the player which would result in a discussion between participants driven by the game master.

Even if the simulation was a little light on rules and mechanics it helped me understand the types of lessons being taught and what needed to be focused on. We needed to get people to ask, “What is my objective right now and what are the steps to completing it?”

Based on the supervision population statistics provided by the SMEs, the new game was to be set in a small, somewhat rural Kentucky city. I spent time exploring Wikipedia and Google Maps for locations to base the game world on. As I narrowed in on several locations, such as Elizabethtown, Paducah, and Danville, I also searched for and recorded screenshots from any available footage of the towns that had been uploaded online. Get Prepared! and My Life are set somewhere but the locations were never specified or fully integrated into gameplay. To my understanding this was intentional but I can’t be sure as I wasn’t there for the ideation of the two experiences.


The setting and environment of a story are as important as the characters and events that act in them. With this new game (and especially because of the known location of the audience) there was an opportunity to give the town more markers of a real space, to make it worth believing in for the player:

PROTOTYPE

I continued to help the pre-production process by refamiliarizing myself with the previous projects. I made a document titled, ‘Keep Cut and Add to My Life.” To do this I played through JobPro: My Life (again) and broke it down based on each new scene that I encountered. I listed each action in each environment, if it could be reused, and if any changes might be needed to make it more appropriate for the new experience. As My Life had been set in a big city and the player was taking the role of a young adult there were to be several major cuts, but overall we found that many things could be reused. I also gave educated guesses about effort level and priorities. Finally, the document concluded with a basic to-do list. This document ended up becoming outdated, but it gave the team a head start when it came to initial sprint planning sessions.

After replaying My Life I was eager to approach certain aspects of the game (especially those highlighted in the previous sections) from a new angle. But, due to overlapping projects it seemed like it would be a while before a programmer could help us prototype. Because of this I decided to create a prototype that could demonstrate the new ideas and could potentially be used for mapping out more of the game if development continued to be delayed. This prototype would focus on a new tutorial that would teach and test the player before unlocking the world, a new approach to the player’s stats, and a modular travel system that maintained relationships between locations.

I made the prototype in Gamemaker Studio 2. Despite making several other prototypes with the software over the years, this one proved challenging. This was due to needing to represent time in the game world and the representation of the player consisting almost entirely of menus. I had never thought about how to capture a 24-hour system in code and I simply didn’t have much experience sorting out interfaces in Gamemaker. I was able to think through these problems and created what I thought might be a viable game slice (though it did take a little longer than I wanted to, about three weeks instead of my estimated one week.)

The tutorial requires the player to perform most of the game’s basic actions in a small sandbox. The setting is that it’s the first day, they just woke up, and they have an appointment soon. The idea is that getting ready to be somewhere in the morning is a microcosm of a busy day. 

After a short intro, they’re given one objective,
“Meet with the reentry coordinator today at 10:30AM”

told where it is,
“At the Parole Office”

and how to get there,
“Your Aunt agreed to give you a lift. Meet her in the front yard at 10.”

It’s of note that this one objective (meet with the reentry coordinator) contains another objective (meet your aunt in the front yard at a specific time). This is intentional as it reflects the way that tasks in the real world often consist of smaller tasks.

In addition to this, to go outside the player first needs to get ready. However, the player isn’t told this explicitly unless they try to travel before getting ready. They are told to check their current status and to look for “important” information. If players look at their status they’ll quickly notice undesirable things like “! Hungry” and “! Bad Breath.” This should lead them to discover how to fix those issues.

Performing all of the required tasks to get ready leaves the player with an extra five minutes until their ride is ready. This forces them to advance time by using one of two “Pass Time” buttons or to choose longer tasks which result in missing the appointment.

When it’s 10:00 AM, a button becomes unlocked. Pressing this brings the player to the travel screen. From here the player learns how to travel to other locations and how to access the actions at that location. There’s a final hard check to make sure that the player knows about the “Wait” ability, and then the player has passed after meeting with the coordinator!

I built out a few more interactions, two objectives, and an end state for the player to achieve (getting to work on time and presentable the next day.) But, the prototype became too strung together as I tried to push it further along. We ended up not needing it as much as I thought we would after a new programmer joined the team.

In hindsight I think that a more manual prototype would have served us better (maybe a paper prototype or something in Google slides with hyperlinks and a spreadsheet) where more complex systems like time and statuses can be tracked by hand. This way I could have focused earlier on designing and balancing the quests and values that are core to the experience instead of getting bogged down in coding.

However, overall the prototype was helpful in that it let us see the ideas in action. More importantly, it enabled the client to see the ideas in action for the first time which is always an important milestone.

MAKING THE EXPERIENCE

The following sections explain in detail how I approached the biggest changes:

-- More objectives and a way to keep track of them
-- Stats that enable you to reach the end, rather than being an end result.
-- Themes and endings
-- Unique playtesting challenges

OBJECTIVES, OBJECTIVES, OBJECTIVES!

My Life is an experience where you have a lot of time to do stuff but not much to do. While this is the life of the young adult in that game, it can lack the ability to drive the player to explore and take risks. Instead of a feeling of, “I have so much to do, how can I do all of it?!” that you might expect a game about time management to elicit, it’s more of a, “I have so much time, what am I supposed to do?”

The transformational goals of this new experience aligned with giving players many objectives. There’s an overwhelming amount of stuff that justice-involved citizens need to manage. Learning to break down larger goals like “don’t violate parole” into smaller tasks and then prioritizing those tasks appropriately can be key for success.

It was my job to sort through the types of responsibilities that justice-involved citizens can have while under supervision. I needed to find a balance between potentially interesting problems for players to solve, which experiences are the most common, severity of consequences, and what was most achievable given the constraints of the project’s existing framework and the budget.

For example, having a child to care for was one the responsibilities that required numerous discussions and was cut early on. It provided plenty of material with which to create complicated problems for players and the severity and stakes would be high, but I saw some impacts it would have on the experience and development. How is the child represented in the game? If we used our current systems would they then be an “item” added to your inventory? That doesn’t seem right! But, otherwise we would need to create a new system to support a second character that is represented on the screen. How were players supposed to take care of the child? Would we need to add new tasks to every scene that are only available if you have your child with you? Or do we add a new element to the interface instead? If all of this is too complicated then maybe we could minimize the presence and interactions with the child and only include something related to taking care of a kid, like paying child support or attending a little league game. But then do we really want to represent the interaction between a parent and their kid with the same level of detail as buying groceries? From a gameplay perspective, would prioritizing your child always be the “right” thing to put first and thus remove incentive to explore different approaches as a result? On top of all of that, not every returning citizen has a child! So solving all of these problems would resonate with only some of the players.

After reviewing all of the content like this I came up with an initial list of goals that were organized into primary, supervision-related goals (things the player must do to avoid violations) and secondary, personal goals (things the player can do to improve their long-term outlook.) I wrote out ideas about how they need to be completed and why they might be unique or challenging.

Because the primary way of interacting with the world is through a “Do Action” button I thought it was especially important to find variations in the rules that determined how objectives were discovered and completed. Here are some ideas that I had:

What if some can only be completed at certain times? On certain days? 

What if some can be completed at any time?

What if one is incredibly early in the day? Unbelievably late?

What if one depends on how much money you have? 

What if you need certain items to complete one?

What if one negatively affects your stats? 

What if there’s one that’s done without visiting the location? 

What if there are multiple ways to do the same one? 

What if one keeps unlocking new steps and never seems to end? 

What if one overlaps with another? If multiple overlap?

What if you need to decide when one will end? 

What if one only helps you complete another?

What if one changes over time? 

What if failing an objective ends your game? 

What if one is hidden in the environment art?

What if some are hidden and only revealed after the game ends?

What if an objective has no clear result?

What if there’s an objective you shouldn’t do? 

What if it's possible to complete an objective well or poorly?

What if one is intentionally inaccurate? (OK maybe not this last one but there are no bad ideas in a brainstorm!)

Not all of these ideas were represented in the game, but this helped me find ways to think about the real-world objectives that the audience experiences through the lens of the game mechanics.

Once I refined the list of objectives I needed to figure out where in each day the player would be able to complete them. I approached this by thinking about the locations in the game as if they were real places. For example, one of the player’s primary goals is to pay their court-mandated supervision fees. I asked the subject matter expert where people pay these and learned that it’s typically done at the county clerk’s office. So I looked up the hours of actual county clerk offices in western Kentucky. Because it’s a government office, the hours are mostly limited to weekdays. This kind of approach gave me an easy starting point that was grounded in reality.

After choosing the hours for locations I mapped them out to help me keep track of and visualize the travel times. This map used the same system for travel times that I had come up with for the Gamemaker prototype. The map is divided into six sections. Each time the player passes through a line that divides sections, an amount of time is added to the travel time. While not an exact system, it made playing with the locations much easier to do.

With the list of objectives, location hours, and map I was able to write out several variations of a playthrough in text and then translate some of them into calendars.

Over the course of the project, the total number of days that the player would have changed due to budget reasons. We initially planned for the player to have a full week, made four days for the prototype, and then ended up completing five days for the final build. This made designing and balancing the quests challenging, but the way of organizing quests described above enabled us to work quickly and remain flexible.

Next I needed to help find a way to help the player keep track of their objectives. My Life supported showing objectives to the player but was limited in its flexibility because it was tied to the calendar. The new list of objectives included things that didn’t need to be completed at specific times so not everything could exist there. Plus, calendars and to-do lists have different functions in real life.

We already knew we wanted to redesign the interface so I took the opportunity to lay out a new idea that included all of the concepts we had discussed up to this point in the project. I based it on the UI in the prototype and tried to use only interactions that already existed in the framework from the previous game. This means that everything is a button that can open a window, and the opened window can contain more buttons to open more windows.

The interface was functional and included all of the new ideas, but that was probably the best thing that could be said about it. As a team, we generally felt that this UI wasn’t fully escaping the clarity and navigation issues that the UI in My Life suffered from.

Thankfully a piece of great and honest feedback from the client pushed us to think about the UI in a more straightforward way. It was something like, “Why not just base it on calendars and to-do lists in real life? Why not put it on a phone in the game that the player can look at?”

This idea also had the potential benefit of giving players a practical way of organizing information by calling attention to the phone as a self-management tool. At first this seemed like it would be difficult to implement, but I was able to find a way to represent the phone using the same system as before:

These designs were enough for the artist to play with the idea, and after reviewing some ideas together we landed on this:

Over the course of the project we encountered issues and questions regarding each UI element. As for how to show the player their objectives, here are some of the things that were discussed and iterated upon:

-- Should the objectives be organized by type?

-- How does the player set an objective?

-- How do we show the player that they completed an objective?

-- How do we show the player that a new objective is on their list?

-- Do we tell the player which objectives are the most important?

-- What happens if the player taps on the objective display? 

PLAYMAKER

The senior programmer who joined the project implemented the Unity plugin, Playmaker, to give designers the ability to easily create and edit tasks and states. We worked together to define what the tool needed to do to enable design to build the game.

With this system we could set when and why the option to perform a task appears and then set all of the results of choosing to do that action.

I was responsible for documenting and managing all of the tasks in the game. I accomplished this with a big Google Sheet (similar to the one used for My Life.) I set up the majority of the actions in the game and received help from two designers when available.

Here’s the final list of quests as they appear in the design doc. One of the goals for this experience was to give players seemingly too much to manage (to reflect the real-world feeling described by justice-involved citizens) and we achieved that here.

STATUS

In My Life the player accumulates points toward a ranking but never has a clearly defined present state that’s required to achieve something. This would be like if the goal of an RPG were to reach a certain level, rather than your level giving you the ability to defeat the final boss.

If (in real life) I brush my teeth, groom, and shower on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday but choose to do none of that on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday then how will I appear to people at work on Saturday? I might get sent home! My Life doesn’t account for this. It doesn’t require the player to perform most of the basic actions to make it through the week.

To add to this, at a basic, video game-language level, what do you expect to happen when your health reaches zero? You lose! In My Life the player starts the game with zero health. In this way, it was always unclear what the meters and bars at the top of the screen meant.

I wanted to rethink this point system based on the types of things that might be important to the new audience and use it to find ways to encourage players to practice habits in the game that might be similar to habits formed in real life.

I also wanted this to be a way to balance the actions in the game and give context to why the player needs to take care of themselves (“Take care of yourself so you don’t get sick” as opposed to “Take care of yourself so you get a high score.”)

The first major thing that I wanted to work on was the idea of the player’s statuses as a result of their actions (if the player does something, what state are they now in?)

Identifying what statuses to include and what affected those statuses was straightforward. The SME simply told us what to do! I was told that it was essential for people on supervision to do everything they can to hold down a job, as employment is a key factor in reducing recidivism. To do this, they need to be healthy and maintain a socially acceptable appearance.

So, at any point I wanted the player to be able to answer these two questions, “Am I healthy right now?” and “What do I look like right now?”

I wasn’t sure yet what the exact consequences for failing to maintain the statuses would be, but I knew generally that it would result in a loss of some kind.

When and why they’re considered healthy or their appearance work-appropriate was more difficult to answer within the game. I first wrote out and mocked up some examples in which five factors would determine health and five factors would determine appearance.

Health would be determined by: 

-- Rest

-- Diet

-- Mental health

-- Bathing habits

-- Dental hygiene

And appearance would be determined by:

-- Types of clothes

-- Cleanliness of clothes

-- Grooming habits

-- Bathing habits

-- Dental hygiene

The player would tap on the thing that they want to know more about and it would reveal their current information and hints about how to fix any issues.

I envisioned a system (which was partially built in the Gamemaker prototype mentioned earlier) in which the player’s health would decay and regenerate based on how high or low each factor is. Each factor would consist of three tiers. For example, ‘Hunger’ would be separated into ‘Full’, ‘Hungry’, and ‘Ravenous’. Each factor would deplete by a small amount every minute. If one drops into the bottom tier then it starts to drain the player’s overall health points. This drain effect would stack, so a player who is neglecting many health factors would lose health quicker than someone who is only missing one thing.

For example:

It’s 12:00 PM. 

The player has 100 Health.

Their Mind factor is “Fine”
at 15/24

Their Sleep is “Exhausted”
at 7/24

Their Hunger is “Hungry”
at 8/24

Their Dental Hygiene is “Minty”
at 20/24

Their Cleanliness is “Smelly”
at 4/24

If an hour passes with no actions performed then

At 1:00 PM:

The player will have 98 Health

Mind is Fine,
14.8/24

Sleep is Exhausted,
6/24

Hunger becomes Ravenous,
7/24

Dental is Minty,
19/24

Cleanliness is Smelly,
3/24

To regain health, players need to perform restorative actions. If you're tired then sleep. Hungry? Eat. Only when all health factors are within the highest tier does health regenerate. This was designed this way so that players wouldn’t be able to ignore any one thing entirely.

Early on, this system also included some more complex ideas to try to represent each factor’s way of affecting a person, such as sleep granting a boost based on how much you slept, different types of food giving bonuses, and mental health being a factor that affects the rates of all other health factors!

Appearance was a little more complicated because it would depend on some of the same factors as health (like brushing your teeth and showering) but also depend on flags being set that aren’t based on points. For example, are you wearing nice clothes or not? However, the clothes would also depend on their own factor of being clean or dirty (different actions, such as working out, would cause different amounts of grime to build up. Clothes could only be restored to clean by going to the laundromat and so became tied to money as well.) 

Over the course of many discussions, we realized that these systems were too complicated. When we tried to talk about them they just continued to cause confusion on the team. With careful explanation and reference to documentation I could see confusion turn into an “Aha!” moment. But then, that was always followed by an important question, “Does this actually need to be so complex?” If we have trouble with it and it's our game then how will players understand it? Lucky to have this feedback, I listened to the team and we simplified the status system.

We reduced the number of factors for each status down to three:

Sleep, Food, and Mood (formerly Mind) would only affect health.

Breath, Grooming, and Bathing would only affect appearance.

All “special” properties were removed (such as ‘Mind’ affecting all other health-related factors.) Finally, the clothes factor would be shifted to only affect how you do at work (whether or not you buy and wear your work uniform.) The cleanliness of clothes was also removed as a factor.

This new system still seems complicated, but ends up coming down to the player performing crucial routines at home. These include actions like going to bed around the same time each night and bathing once a day. Once the player realizes this, it becomes straightforward to put aside the required time each day to maintain their health and appearance.

To keep some challenge and to touch on a learning objective, I decided to focus 'Mood' primarily on discovering meaningful social interactions. The challenge is derived from two things. First, the interactions to restore Mood are rare, so it’s not possible to quickly replenish the Mood stat. Second, Mood drains and fills at a much slower rate than other factors. If the player ignores social interactions then by the time they incur a health penalty it will become a near permanent issue for the rest of the playthrough (your mood and mindset isn't like being hungry, you can't just eat to fix it!) The game is balanced so that you can still reach the end in such a state but isn’t without consequence (which is described in the next section.)

Overall, the new system achieved the intended purpose of giving players contextualized, repeatable tasks related to the types of habits they’ll need to practice outside of the game. It helps give the player more of a connection to the world and can pressure them to make choices. However, how the game tells the player about this system could use significant iteration to find a way to make these stats more noticeable and satisfying to manage. 

ENDINGS & THEMES

Lastly, I was responsible for figuring out how all of these things were supposed to come together in a meaningful way. How does the experience end? Why did the player spend all of this time in this world?

The player’s goal in playing the game is to learn something that will help them reach the end of their real-life, upcoming supervision without violating any of the conditions.

With this, it’s straightforward to think of a losing state: the player violates their supervision terms and ends up back in prison. But what about a winning state? The opposite would seem to be that the player completes their supervision and sees the end of their sentence. However, supervision can be a lengthy process and we wanted the experience to relate more to people who are closer to the beginning of their return to society rather than the end. We definitely did not have the ability to try to create a simulation that could represent months or years of time. How were we to make less than a week’s worth of time in a virtual world feel like an accomplishment to a player in this situation? There might be some intrinsic sense of achievement through reaching the end of the game, but we wanted the end to resonate with the audience.

I brought this to the SME and through discussion we arrived at an idea. She explained that earning or working toward reduced supervision time is a realistic goal that people strive for (and is even incentivized by the justice system.) We decided to use this as the “good” primary ending for players. But what about the goals not directly related to supervision terms? It was very tempting to cut them at this point, but we knew that one of the key, complicating factors for justice-involved citizens is the messy and overwhelming entanglement of personal needs with their supervision terms. The added pressure of pursuing wants and needs is part of what makes it difficult to succeed. Here I decided to borrow more directly from My Life, and the player’s reward for succeeding would be the acknowledgement of a job well done and the potential future effects of high or low achievement.

Now we just needed to figure out how to present all of this.

I came upon the answer while trying to name the town that the player would be exploring. While brainstorming, my deep love and appreciation for insects quickly led me to thinking about a classic symbol of change, the cocoon.

Upon reading the Wikipedia entry for the woolly bear I realized that seasons would be a strong and suitable theme to explore.

We set the experience in the fall, a "complex" season representing a transition from the wild growth of summer into a period of reflection and preparation for winter.

Choosing a nature-based theme like this also made sense because the experience would consist of so much exterior environment art. There would be plenty of opportunities for autumn to be visible.

I created the following mockups to try to capture this:

We planned to tie this concept of changing seasons into the endings, which would be presented to the player as short, multi-panel sequences of images.

If the player did well, then their ending would be set in the spring and celebrate their new potential as a result of the hard work they just did.

If they did poorly, their ending would be set in the dead of winter with a hazy sky, showing potential hardship ahead.

However, how this would actually work was never clearly defined to the point that it could be implemented in a build. The ‘Endings’ story lived in the backlog until finally it became clear to us that we wouldn’t have enough time to create artwork that captured all of the differences in the endings. Nor would we have enough time to think up something new. We still managed to represent some of the initial ideas but overall it became focused on functionality and completion.

Though it ended up not being as visual as we initially desired, it’s dynamic in that the text is modular and different lines appear based on the player’s action. I was responsible for defining the criteria and balancing how the player achieved different endings.

In total there are 10 endings.
Endings are either Primary or Secondary.

An ending is Primary if it relates to reporting to your supervisor:

1 Get fired

2 Get arrested

3 Lose all health points

4 Fail to report to supervision

5 Successfully report to supervision but fail to fulfill multiple requirements

6 Successfully report to supervision and fulfill most or all requirements

An ending is Secondary if it relates to your personal goals.

7 Foggy Outlook

8 Hazy Outlook

9 Clear Outlook

10 Bright Outlook

The player always sees a Primary ending.
The player only sees a Secondary ending if they report to the supervisor.

For example, it’s possible to report to the supervisor on time but still receive a hazy or foggy outlook. The logic is that even though the player focused enough to complete the primary goal, they didn’t practice the types of things that will help them continue to succeed in the future. It’s possible their avatar will figure it out over time, but it isn’t clear based on what happened in the experience.

The requirements for endings can consist of completing objectives on time, player conditions when completing objectives, avoiding specific tasks, and health points. If a requirement is met then the player receives points which are added up to determine which piece of text they see at the end.

The endings are balanced so that the things that have the most impact on justice-involved citizens are worth the most points. Habits related to employability, social support, and health are worth more than exploring new career opportunities.

They’re also balanced around completing objectives. So generally, a player who completes more of their objectives will coincidentally achieve a good ending as long as they explore a little bit in the areas that they find themselves in because of the objectives.

I balanced the ending possibilities primarily through manual simulations in various spreadsheets and documents, alongside countless hours of playing with the systems that the programmer and I came up with.

The final scoring framework that we made was easy to use and I think if we had worked on it sooner we would have found an equally creative and simple way of presenting the information.

I pushed to include several settings and actions in the game that have no impact on the endings.

I insisted on a cemetery, which is a purely optional area. It’s meant only to remind the player that their real time is finite (though it never explicitly states this.) It’s not a coincidence that the cemetery is the location closest to where you’re living.

I also wanted to include someone who the player could choose to help at their own expense and with no in-game reward for the player. It’s there for the player to potentially discover a moment of empathy and self reflection.

It’s difficult to argue for the inclusion of optional content that isn’t directly tied to the measurable player outcomes due to production limits, but I think it’s important for life sims like this to include side content and moments of discovery. I wish we could have included more or found a way to make the ones we did include more impactful, but I’m still proud of the work we did to include them at all.

Overall, the game captures the player’s actions over the course of their experience but fumbles when presenting the information at the end. This is a key issue and something in the game that I think would benefit the most from more iteration.

PLAYTESTING

In addition to thinking through and making the actual game, I was responsible for playtesting, analyzing observations, and determining playtest outcomes.

This project (and its concurrent sister project, ReEntry: Next Step (which I was also lead designer on)) posed a unique challenge. The true audience, incarcerated people in the prerelease classes, were unavailable to us.

We tried to be granted direct access to them but were unsuccessful. Only the SMEs would be able to work with the audience in the classrooms. We would still be able to playtest with general players but knew that wouldn’t be the same as getting it into the hands of the actual, intended people.

After some discussion, we came up with an idea together. What if we trained the SMEs on playtesting and they conducted the playtests? Then afterwards, we could discuss and analyze the results together? This seemed risky in a few ways, but the SMEs for this project had an interest in game design. This is always a pleasant and fun thing when it happens. I become more and more interested and educated about the subject and they become more and more interested and educated about making games! These interactions with clients where we’re teaching each other is one of my favorite aspects of working on projects like this.

Anyways, what better way to start your game design journey than to just start trying stuff? The SMEs were more than up to the task.

In preparation for a discussion about how to conduct a playtest, I put together a document that describes what a playtest is, what types of questions we’re trying to answer, tips for running it smoothly, and a set of questions to ask players afterwards (which includes Schell Games’ FFWWDD.) I also put together build and content guides and other reference material. 

In total, four playtests were conducted this way (two for Next Step and two for Fresh Start) and when combined with our general playtesting we found the results effective and, in some ways, more effective than usual. The SMEs not only being present at the playtest but being involved gave them a clearer understanding of how their ideas and information were being incorporated into the product.

Moving forward, we talked about the games a little differently as a result. I’m still curious to see if this effect can be repeated or if the people we worked with on this project are more particularly exceptional than I already found them to be.

RELEASE

After wrapping up QA we were ready to send the final build to the client. In total, I worked on the project for a year and four months, though the game wasn’t always being actively worked on throughout that timespan.

The game was officially released two months later in December 2022. As of May 2023 the games are being analyzed for research purposes.

I truly hope that it has a positive impact on someone’s life.

Here it is:

RETROSPECTIVE

ReEntry: Fresh Start is an ambitious iteration following JobPro: Get Prepared! and JobPro: My Life. And, just like those projects, I have a lot of thoughts about the resulting product.

Here are some unorganized thoughts that I wrote down while writing about the project as a kind of retrospective:

-- We failed to implement narrated dialogue and help with text. This was something I pushed for in ReEntry: Next Step after learning more about the struggles with literacy that disproportionately affect justice-involved citizens. If we could update the game this would be top priority, especially with what we’ve learned as a studio when it comes to implementing text-to-speech.

-- The music always gets stuck in my head. Shout out to Brandon Badger for finding and working on the music. I wish we had had more time for him to work on sound effects too. The town of Woolly Worm would feel so alive if actions had distinct sounds and you could hear the environments.

-- I wonder if the game’s systems related to the player’s statuses would be more apparent if the player had an avatar that they could see in the environments. Imagine seeing a character stooped over with sleepiness in a restaurant parking lot after a long night shift. It might also help give a visual model of an acceptable appearance in comparison to an unacceptable one.

-- I wish the environments were more interactive. Imagine if you could tap on lamps to turn them on and off, or tap on doors to leave a location. It might be extra fun if players could tap on things in the environment to examine them or even pick them up. This might have given us more reason to play with the inventory system (which ultimately became an artifact of earlier designs that involved strategies around packing a lunch, remembering important documents, and bringing your groceries home.)

-- Even though the interface was improved in many ways, it’s still kind of confusing in some areas:
---- It’s very easy to miss what the effect of pressing the ‘Advance time five minutes forward’ button is. Which is bad for a game built around time.
---- It’s not very obvious when a status changes or is affected by an action
---- The phone notification systems are buggy.
---- The interface could do more to call attention to completed objectives and encourage players to always have one set.

-- There’s an opportunity to include the reentry services coordinator in the game as a hint system. Maybe this would encourage people in real life to utilize state services more frequently?

-- Some noticeable bugs still persist and I wish I pushed a little harder for them to be fixed.

-- The experience would probably be less overwhelming if I could have found a way to slowly introduce the player to more objectives over the course of the game. I designed it to be overwhelming like it is based on what I learned about the experiences that justice-involved citizens have (where numerous things are dumped on them all at once), but from a gameplay perspective it makes the game’s learning curve too steep too quickly.

-- If I had a magic wand I would make a future version of this with randomized elements that need to be adapted to each time. Starting on different days, different appointment times, different town layouts, different prices and starting values, etc.

CREDITS

Chief Games Officer
Brian Kaleida

Game Producer
Pavan Paravasthu

Lead Designer
Bryon Lagania

Associate Designer
Jack McClain

Associate Designer
Brandon Badger

Primary Developer
Will Pyle

Lead Game Developer
Garrett Kimball

Lead Artist
Matt Denton

Associate Artist
Chelsea Tang

Consulting Artist
Adam Chizmar

Sound Designer
Brandon Badger 

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