Kelly Lin
Forever Nugget
Overview
Forever Nugget is a 48-hour game jam project under the theme 'Time Loop.' It is a point-and-click interactive puzzle game where players must find the correct way to interact with the nugget in order to end its endless loop.
Genre: Puzzle
Engine: Unity (C#)
My Roles & Contribution
Goal Structuring from Moment to Metagame
Instead of providing a single goal, player motivation was structured into three tiers: short-term (get any response), mid-term (achieve partial loop disruption), and long-term (truly break the loop). Each goal layer builds atop the last, offering satisfaction and progress across multiple scales.
Goal Design
Layered Feedback and Discoverable Responses
A multi-layered feedback system was built where player experimentation is continuously met with reinforcement, whether it’s success, failure, or just delightful weirdness. This layering makes even ‘wrong’ actions feel worthwhile. From subtle wobbles to loud glitches, everything hints that something is happening, urging players to keep trying.
Various Interaction Ways and Unexpected Feedback
Balancing Challenge and Curiosity
The greatest design challenge was not making the game hard, but making discovery feel earned without feeling punishing. A click that ‘fails’ still had to feel meaningful. Collider hitboxes, animation delays, and combo input timing were tuned to create a zone where players feel in control, but not spoiled.
Balance Between Difficulty, Reward, and Expansion
Systems That Reward Weirdness
Instead of directing players toward a single correct path, systems will reward interesting wrong answers. When a player right-clicked the background 30 times in a row or scrolled the mouse wheel to "slow down time," we ensured that something—anything—would happen. Players will be rewarded for thinking outside the box and provided with feedback in the form of unique rewards for their creativity.
