We went into the festival knowing that being able to tell what is actually happening was one of Planck v.0’s biggest weaknesses, and this was by far the most prominent issue the judges had. Judge B found that the “correspondence between aliens and sounds is difficult to make sense of,” and Judge A found it “hard to understand whether (for instance) exploding enemies caused any audio or if it was just the shooting.”

Because we were not able to explain well enough how the game actually works through its own gameplay, we included a voluminous amount of supporting documentation with the submission; however, this was not enough and the lack of clarity on the game’s mechanics often led to a sense of not having much control over the music– Judge F felt “it lacked a level of interactivity. I didn’t get the feeling of having an influence on the music other than shoot or not shoot, music on and off.”

This issue speaks to a widespread design challenge: the balance between offering players lots of control and taking away certain choices in order to keep their experience high-quality at all times. This comes up in games of all genres (for example, if we let the player wander anywhere, he or she might decide to walk across a vast desert and get bored or lost).

In Planck, one of our earliest design decisions was that we would never make unwelcome or dissonant sounds if players messed up or lacked skill in the game; we did not want to go down the negative reinforcement route but instead push the idea of a musical experience anyone could enjoy but that skilled players could take in a further direction. However, this also limits our feedback mechanism: our audio feedback on how well the player is doing is based solely on the complexity of the music and the individual samples and elements being triggered at any given time. Unless players knew beforehand what elements are associated with what enemies, the distinction can be hard to make.

Judge C summed up the game’s promise versus its currently unintuitive mechanics succinctly by saying that “Planck is both confusing at first and fascinating,” a sentiment that we hope bodes well for the game once we are able to demystify and build upon its mechanics in its future iterations.

Finally, because we submitted only a single level with a bare-bones user interface (basically just a single button that started the level Mental Breakdown), some of the judges felt the game was just too far from being a finished product to really give it a full evaluation. Judge A observed that our submission “feels much more like a tech demo than an actual game” and that “as a game I see this in very early stages of development.” At the same time, Judge A also encouraged us by saying that “with further work and something more concrete this could turn out as something cool,” and Judge B said simply “I’m looking forward to seeing the finished result!” So are we!