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On this page, you will find my honest and thorough perspective on the making of Museum.exe. It is a project I facilitated and directed to the best of my abilities as a former game design student. Like many design projects, Museum.exe wasn't an exception to experimenting with design, iteration, and testing.
Despite ending up being a simple concept, it is something that wasn't done before - making the game required a lot of trial and error before it reached its final state. Museum.exe combines game design and museum design to a great extent - far from anything the team originally started with.
This is a thesis project I worked on together with a team of 4 - all former game design students at Uppsala University. It earned us a pass with distinction for the course and it was awarded "Jury Spotlight" at the Gotland Game Conference 2024 - an annual event held at the end of each academic year for game design students and attended by developers from the game industry.
Team: 5 People Software: Unity, Draw.io, Jira Roles: Facilitation, Management, Research, Design, Testing Duration: 17 Weeks
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Museum.exe is an interactive museum experience that showcases the best of the indie games industry and talks about gamemaking - how it started and how it is done today. The game contains a selection of 30+ games, scattered across themed exhibitions filled with puzzles and secret locations. No goals or objectives - explore it at your pace, any way you like!
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TL:DR
The project faced many challenges - both from inside and outside of the development team. Starting with the inconsistent presence of team members and skill difference that warped the team dynamic, to other issues related to the game vision and academic constraints. I hope bringing such insights provides clarity to the challenges I dealt with as the project's leader.
Research & Iterations
(A more extensive description can be found in our thesis written alongside with the project here.)
Iteration 1 - One Room
The first iteration set the general aesthetic that was followed throughout the development of Museum.exe. It contained only one room that was filled with screenshots and text. It also partially included puzzles prototyped during the preplanning phase of the project. The main goal of this iteration was to gain player's understanding of the concept and their perception of the project on a base level - their opinion
on the matter, anything they would find missing, and so on. This is when we discovered that interaction would be a crucial part of such an experience - besides the many walls of text, the game didn't offer anything else. Since the text was essential to what we wanted to achieve with the project, we decided to diverge from the concept of Monuments to Guilt - the game with no mechanics, - and looked for ways to utilize game design in a museum environment.
Iteration 2 - A Big Puzzle
In the second iteration, we tried another approach - in that same room, we created a puzzle that would combine all exhibits located on the first floor. The idea was that the player would find cubes in that area with different words on them and then assign them to each corresponding exhibit. The text was supposed to help them choose the right cubes to place on platforms but
soon enough we observed playtesters brute forcing the puzzle. We intended to make reading less boring but our conclusion after that iteration was that such puzzle design wouldn't be healthy for the game and we needed to continue iterating.
Iteration 3 - Attention to detail
The development of other exhibition sections resumed. The visual language was fully established and we continued reaching for a "sections complete" version of the project - the one with all rooms designed but no content. This is also when we finally defined the selection of games we wanted to showcase. While we did have it from the start, we soon realized that our
choice was also defined by scope and balance. The presented games varied in complexity, tone, and art style and we needed to be mindful of that. So instead of being just modular units that organize content, new exhibition sections needed to consider the format of the games and their implications. In this iteration, narrative games with few mechanics gained a greater visual emphasis, while puzzle games present one mechanic that exists in the real game. Thus, a section with 2D games also appeared, and even though we did select 2D narrative experiences, they were sorted along with other 2D games and not story-based ones.
Iteration 4 - Effort Value
When players playtested this iteration, they started acknowledging the effort put into this project, which had an interesting effect. Since Museum.exe aimed to show the non-violent side of the game industry and celebrate it, the treatment given to the overall experience also influenced the
playtester's perception of the games presented in the museum, and in a good way. Players often mentioned the welcoming tone of the environment and we also noticed how they could subconsciously understand the significance of the presented games to the game industry and the creators of this project. And finally, they started to find the text in the museum valuable. Nailing the balance between textual and visual information was an important step in the development and great progress. This was also the last iteration where we continued to add content - new secret rooms that are optional for the player to discover. The last iteration only included polishing.
Iteration 5 - Polishing and GGC 2024
The last iteration primarily contained bug fixes and last-moment changes. The current version of Museum.exe also contains voice acting which was refined in this iteration. The project was then presented at the 3-day conference and, just like the playtesters, the conference attendees also managed to find small bugs that we were fixing at the end of each day.
The project was awarded "Jury Spotlight" at GGC 2024 and gained a lot of praise from many players, including those who randomly stumbled upon the game on Itch.io . Here is the video of the award ceremony, where you can find me and my team at 1:14:06 :)
The Result
Conclusion
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This is the most significant project I worked on throughout my university education. While there were larger projects I took part in, they were facilitated by others and I was usually given the role of a manager or designer in them. Museum.exe wasn't an exception to that, yet I was also able to direct my own ideas and iterate on them. Games are never released the way they are envisioned from the start, even those with a large budget, and I cannot stress the importance of experiencing that first-hand enough.
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Throughout the development of Museum.exe, we also reached out to some of the developers who worked on the games we showcased. While some appreciated their game being included in our project, Steve Gaynor - the creator of Gone Home, Tacoma, and other games - enjoyed our project the most. He sent us a lot of feedback on what could be improved or done better. He mentioned a "high conceptual and implementation quality" but he also explained in detail how the in-game text looked unprofessional in comparison. Since I worked on the text the most, I can't avoid saying that his feedback was one of my main takeaways as well.
Check out his newsletter where he talks about our game here!
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