Early on in this sprint, I wanted to solve the issue the team had found with the way in which we were giving instructions to players on what to do upon starting the game - for our previous release, due to time crunches and being behind on work, we ended up having to throw blocks of text on the walls of our game scenes in order to let players know to interact with certain items or complete tasks. This is a very jarring, inefficient way to provide players with context and could be improved upon so as to not take players out of the experience.
I was initially inspired by posters that would have been printed to motivate employees in the workplace of the 1950s - the era the game's theater is from. These posters were uplifting and also provided information on things like how to communicate in the workplace, motivating one's self to work for the best results, and getting stuck into projects rather than thinking about them:
I then went and looked into games that use these same kinds of posters to give the players context in relation to the game's world and about items they can obtain and use. Some good examples I found were from Bioshock, Fallout, and Alice: Madness Returns:
From here, I decided to design similar posters with interactable and collectable objects as the focal point of each poster, similar to what I found from videogame posters, and include some text about what these objects can do to benefit the player, combining both the real life motivational posters and videogame posters to make completely new ones for our own game.
I decided to choose some simplistic backgrounds for each poster so that the featured objects can still be easily made out in greyscale. One the new textures for the bed and tool model are added, these two posters can be remade with the coloured assets to match the fully coloured task machine poster. I also plan to make an extra poster to depict how to interact with the mannequin mechanic, but I also believe having some voice lines relating to the mechanic could also be effective and save players from having to do a lot of reading before they can start playing.