Hey everyone – welcome to dev log 58!
Last week we spoke to Laura and Dave, who worked on the Art and Design of our popular mini-golf course level: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1290000/view/3305091754553822107
For this week’s dev log, we wanted to shed some light on how something as simple as naming conventions can impact the fun of PowerWash Simulator. No stone is left unturned (or unclean!) in chasing ultimate DING satisfaction!
Accurate Representation of Subtasks
An important step in the process of developing any PowerWash Simulator job is determining the subtasks of a job. This involves breaking down the job into all its components. Sometimes this is as simple as identifying the walls, floors and windows of a building but when the jobs get more elaborate and technical quite a bit of research is sometimes required from the designers to identify “What is that thing supposed to be called!?!”
An example of the investigative research process is the Steam Locomotive where we had to identify a myriad of specific terms for such a machine that we were unfamiliar with.
The Smokebox, Cowcatcher, SteamDome, Furnace and the parts surrounding these objects all must be identified and labelled in a way that makes them easy to identify without the terminology being too technical, but also accurate to historical references. Panels, pistons, rods, wheels, dials and skirtings - the list goes on and on until eventually we have a job which has been completely and accurately broken down.
As designers on PowerWash Simulator we often laugh about how we need to become overnight experts on the inner-workings and mechanics of our jobs so that we’re able to label them accurately. We hope that as players progress through the game they get some educational value out of learning the names of components as they clean them. Who knew that the bricks around the top of the castle walls in the Mini-Golf Course were called Crenulations or that the small bumps which appear under the wings of the Private Jet are called Vortex Generators. We certainly didn’t until we started working on these jobs!
Dishing out the Dings
Of course, accurate labelling of components for educational value isn’t the only reason we breakdown jobs into their subtasks – its all about the dings! We want to make sure that players have an enjoyable and satisfying experience making their way around a job so when we enact the breakdown, we try to ensure that subtasks are appropriately split up to provide maximum satisfaction as the job is cleaned.
The cab area of the Steam Locomotive was deliberately filled with many small objects to ding clean. We could have easily included the dials, pipes and boxes their connected to as singular objects but instead opted to label them as individual subtasks just so players can enjoy the satisfying combo of dings as they run their washer across this area. The cab area was designed this way to act as both a reward and change of pace from the larger subtasks to clean outside the locomotive.
Optimal ding satisfaction also leads us to split jobs further than initially conceived to create extra subtasks/dings. A perfect example of this is in the Ancient Statue job where the mighty height of the figure led us to split the torso, chest, neck and arm areas up into slabs rather than making them singular large subtasks to clean.
Helping Players Find Objects by their Subtask Names
The final consideration that goes into how jobs are broken down is providing important information in the subtask names. This is to help players find the location of subtasks as they clean the job.
Good examples of this are in levels like the Stunt Plane where we have an Upper Wing, Lower Wings and objects like the Upper Wing Alerions and Lower Wing Ailerons which are linked to their respective wings by name to help players identify where exactly to find them.
We could have just as easily have labelled the wings as ‘Wings’ and their ailerons as ‘Ailerons’ but we believe that providing this positional information is beneficial to helping players hunt down those final pesky pieces of dirt hidden throughout the job.
So, there you have it. Next time you are at 99% clean and hunting down that last pesky speck of dirt, see if there are any contextual clues in the item name to narrow down your search.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at how and why our developers get into granular detail with naming every single item and surface in PowerWash Simulator – it’s all about the DINGs!
Weekly Meme
Each week we release a PowerWash version of a popular meme format. This week it is 'Two Buttons'. How would you caption it? If you have any recommendations, please also let us know below!
That's All, Folks!
Thank you to everyone for reading. We hope everyone is enjoying the new content and these insights! :)
Keep up with everything PowerWash Simulator by following our channels:
Twitter: @PowerWashSim
Twitch: futurlab
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@powerwashsim?
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/powerwashsim/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/powerwashsim
PWS Wiki: https://powerwash-simulator.fandom.com/wiki/PowerWash_Simulator_Wiki