Hans

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Hans is a hand drawn RPG with eight possible endings. It takes place during World War I, where you play as an alien who just wants to bake magical confections to help his community, but isn't sure if he should follow every request given to him.

Hans is a game made primarily by Elaine Toh and I, with music and sound effects crafted by a group of students from the Berkeley School of Music. I concepted and designed the game, made all art assets except the UI, wrote the dialogue, and did the majority of the production work (burndown sheet, macro sheet, guides for the Berkeley students, meetings with USC Student Publishing to get the game published to Steam, etc.)

Systems Design

Based on where the player is in the story and what they decide to do, Hans swaps between three types of gameplay systems:

1. Walking Sim / Point & Click Gameplay

2. Magic Gathering Gameplay

3. Baking Gameplay

Iterative Proccess

At the end of each biweekly sprint, we would host multiple playtests, during which we would record the gameplay and I would notate every single word they said. Afer each playtest, we would have the playtester fill out a survey Google form without our looking so as to give them a chance to give their accurate feelings about each element of the game.

Elaine also made sure to program in some statistics trackers so that we could easily gather information such as which of the eight routes players ended up going down, how long it took them, how many restarts they had (if any), etc.

Narrative Design

I had three primary goals for the narrative of this game, that the majority of gameplay and dialogue decisions would come down to:

1. Narrative is at the core of all gameplay.

2. Player's baking outcomes heavily impact the plot.

3. The characters are interesting: each is charming but flawed in their own ways.

I also wrote a variety of tones into this game. There are eight possible endings, so depending on player choices, it can be mostly goofy and light hearted, bittersweet and serious, or downright depressing.

Looking back, I do think that I could have done a bit better of a job with mixing such different tones, but I still do stand by my assertion that tone variety is a great way to keep players on their toes. That it's a big part of what can make branching narrative games fun not only to play but to compare with other people's experiences as well.

Production Materials: Game Design Macro, Burndown Chart