congamoeba, the silly "friendship simulator" by @kev-adsett, @will-d, @nick-jacops and myself, explores the first steps of a much more ambitious concept - learning a completely alien language. In the game, the player imitates the cute noises made by their fellow amoebas, befriending them to the noble goal of forming a giant conga line of shared joy!

Whilst we're not anticipating that players will necessarily begin to look for meaning in these conversations, we were careful to ensure that there's some authenticity behind it. In fact, every line of 'dialogue' in the game is a deliberately constructed sentence, ranging from a simple "hi" to outright flirting. So even though the player's goal is simply to copy what they hear, we wanted to ensure the connections were all made in their own heads - no simple matching of colours or icons onscreen for us!

play the game

You can read a broader post-mortem by @kev-adsett from his profile, and please check out the game first if you haven't already! We'd love to get your feedback on it! From here I'm going to talk about how we tried to make a fun toy that anyone could pick up and play without needing instruction.

Firstly, showing all the keys used to play the game onscreen and having clear feedback when they're used. This is subtly extra helpful for a browser game as it makes it a little clearer why the game isn't responding if you accidentally lose focus.

Next comes teaching the mechanics of the game.

Our initial, somewhat naive approach was simply to allow players to make any sound outside of conversations, so you can remind yourself of which button is which in a stress-free environment. Thing is, we knew players would have to figure out what to do in the first place. People kept looking for meaning in elements of the game that had none (such as the colours on each amoeba), rather than spotting the simple imitation mechanic. We needed time to ponder this!

Luckily the LD Jam is 72 hours, which gave us a whole extra day after the weekend was over to use our colleagues as guinea pigs and iterate on the experience!

First we decided to unlock the player's ability to use sounds only when they first hear that sound. The first conversation in the game is just a single 'eep' - so there's only one button available to press, which will result in instant success.

This is followed by two phrases: 'eep'/'eep eep'. The latter, two button presses that hint at the imitation mechanic, as the player can only progress once they've 'eep eep'ed themself. From there we gradually introduce new sounds and longer phrases, the introduction of each acting as a hint that the player must now use it to progress.

The second major change was to add 'subtitles' in a strange, glyph-like language. We'd wanted to get that in anyway, as @nick-jacops and @will-d, our artist and writer, had already concepted it. I decided to keep the subtitle onscreen until the player begins making sounds of their own, before overriding it with the player's choice of words. Again this reinforces the imitation mechanic, making deviations more obvious - but critically, avoids mapping those symbols to the interface directly. Rather, it's up to the player to remember which key connects to which sound, and which sound to each symbol.

Obviously not spelling things out means there's some margin for misunderstanding - however the vast majority of players after these changes seem to 'get' the game and have fun with even the stripped down mechanics present, which is awesome! We'd love to hear more feedback, especially from folks who wouldn't self-describe as gamers, and are perhaps less familiar with the idioms of game design! Get your Gran to play it!

Hopefully the tiny experience we've created provides players with enough knowledge of our amoebic language's sound that we could follow up and explore it in more demanding situations - introducing meaning, or having the player react to text-only stimuli.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy our silly little toy!