Pick Up And Play

We wanted Mend to be a game anyone, regardless of skill level, could play. And to play a game, players need to know at least two things: "what should I do" and "how do I do it". These two things can be roughly translated into the game's objective and controls. While this doesn't apply to every game, it's a good rule of thumb for most traditional ones.

But we also wanted to teach players how to play without telling them how to play. In the end, we decided that subconscious hints would have to do the job. There were three hints to the game's objective:

1. The Gestalt principle of closure. Even if players had no clue of what to do, they themselves could decide to put the pieces together. To reinforce this, we had the next hint.

2. The game's logo, the "mended square". It's both the logo of the game and the very first image you see. It won't go away until you interact with it in some way. The players see the pieces together first and apart second.

3. The game's tagline "Put yourself together" literally tells players what to do. Although subtle, it was likely something players had read recently.

Teaching players how to control was considerably more straightforward: We just supported every conceivable control scheme and hoped for the best. This worked surprisingly well and during playtest, people played in very different ways from each other.

Once we had the "what" and "how" of the game, we tested it out. I sent it to my mom. Minutes later, she replied back saying she had just "beat it" four times. We were in the middle of a game jam, so we called it a success and moved on.