Games Studies / Project: Fragments of Lies

22/9/25 - 29/12/25 // Week 1 - Week 15

Chuah Shu En // 0368157

Bachelors of  Design (Honours) in Creative Media

Games Studies // Project: Fragments of Lies

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Table of Contents

1. Lectures

2. Instructions

3. Task

4. Feedback

5. Reflection

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Lectures

Primary Gameplay Mechanics:

1. Movement/ turn actions, dice rolling, card drawing/playing
2. Secondary Mechanics
3. Resource management, 
4. Feedback Loops
5. Positive and negative reinforcement systems (rewards and penalties, risk)

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Instructions

<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F57g28IcDlgeedFFJsLFa1NN1b_asXoH/preview" width="640" height="480"></iframe>

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Task

After we were assigned our task, we started brainstorming on what kind of game we wanted and ended up with something like Werewolf or Deception. With that in mind, we kicked off our project by going to a board game cafe to find inspiration from other currently available games.

After our session together, we went home and started brainstorming on our own game and creating our proposal slides for our game called Fragment of Lies.

Proposal slides: https://www.canva.com/design/DAG1twuDIp0/fJpaW9nSCrRez68lUIqQoA/edit?utm_content=DAG1twuDIp0&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

After getting approval and working on our game mechanics, we started play testing with our classmates and got a lot of good feedback.

We also designed how our cards look like:

https://www.canva.com/design/DAG5qA1NtqM/3zFTYrRCkIb5aRW7H0-6sg/edit?utm_content=DAG5qA1NtqM&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

After a few more playtests with classmates and even Mr. Sylvain, we ended up adding detective hint cards to keep the murderer from winning. 

Here are the final presentation slides:

https://www.canva.com/design/DAG83cYrXBQ/CMKsoHw2EuHUPvIOftQYzA/edit?utm_content=DAG83cYrXBQ&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

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Feedback

Week 5 (Feedback from playtesting)

It's hard for the classmates to win against the murderer so maybe there could be power-up cards that help the classmates. Also a bit awkward for players to start discussing without a host.

Week 12 (Feedback from playtesting)

Add more story aspects such as player identities into the game so that there's roleplaying which makes it easier to accuse and discuss instead of going off of vibes. The weapon and clue cards feel like they're here to stall the game when the classmates already know the murderer's identity. 

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Reflection

At first I thought game studies was about coding games but I was surprised to find that it was more player-focused and finding out what makes a game fun and playable. I learnt a lot about user experience and principles such as gamification. On the group project side, I had a lot of fun coming up with ideas and designing the game with my group mates especially the week when we went to the boardgame cafe to get inspiration for out game. 

I felt that my main obstacle was adjusting the game after play testing because it took a lot of brain power to think of solutions and fixing game mechanics sounds easy but it's actually kind of hard. Luckily I had innovative and creative group mates to help think of ideas and some of them actually worked, such as adding the three new categories of detective hint cards, and it made the game feel so much better to play! 

All in all, this was a valuable learning experience for me as I was able to enhance my problem-solving, time management and people-skills.