
Role:
UI/UX Developer
Tools:
Unity, GIMP, Visual Studio Code
Timeline:
June 2024
Team:
Ava Miel, Luna Vivian Zaremba, Ethan Grafton (backspace_), Ryan Koning

What is Clara’s Cauldron Conundrum?
Clara’s Cauldron Conundrum is a crafting and puzzle game I created with a small team in June of 2024. This game was submitted to Portland Independant Gaming Squad and was the second most played game at the entire expo!
No Time to Simmer
With the exceptionally short timetable of a Game Jam, a dedicated research phase was out of the question. So, I decided to send out builds of the game at several stages, as well as UI samples, to friends and collegues to interview for readablility. Findings were pretty consistent across development:
Contrast
Early builds of the game relied contrast to separate different UI elements from the rest of the environment. Early build did not exhibit enough contrast between elements of the User Interface. While users were able to consistently find the UI, each game would only be played for 5 minutes on stream and every moment counted.
Context
After it became easy for players to find every individual UI element, some still had trouble understanding their purpose. This was partly due to the game’s purpose as a puzzle game, but hints and tutorials became essential to players who weren’t very well versed in crafting games.
Consolidation
Originally, our team played with the idea of deliberately obfuscating certain in-game elements to add challenge to certain puzzles. This idea was ultimately dropped because the most rewarding part of a puzzle is the ‘a-ha’ moment when the player understands what’s being asked of them. Anything further barriers after that caused frustration.
The Challenge

The game mechanics of Clara’s Cauldron Conundrum can be a bit involved, even before the more difficult puzzles. In order to be able to engage with the more advanced mechanics, players would need to quickly understand the base mechanics. Mechanics would need to be as simple as possible and easily explained.
Mechanics
Our initial inspiration for the central mechanics comes from Macbeth:
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Each of these ingredients is considered cursed in it’s original context for reasons that would have been obvious to a 13th century play goer. I chose ingredients that would be considered obviously cursed to a modern player. Clara’s Cauldron Conundrum casually uses elements from it’s own UI, as well as abstract attributes like video resolution as ingredients in its potions. With this in mind, I separated the tutorial UI from the more malleable traditional UI, by setting them as objects in the world. This had the added benefit of giving players immediate feedback when they were succeeding. The tutorial UI was already where they were looking at a given moment.
Key Insights
Players completed the tutorial much more quickly when they had immediate feedback. A large green UI checkmark appears as soon as the player has completed a step in the tutorial.
Lower experience groups found they weren’t sure what to do next. The Traits mechanic, a series of conditionals that spell out your characters next moves in a given situation, often made these players more comfortable.
Less experienced players greatly benefitted from graphics that showed the exact keys they needed to press. The added contrast of the black keys on a parchment background margianally increased the speed that experienced players completed the tutorial, as well.
Key Takeaways and Future Projects
Tutorial UI, regardless of platform, must be immediately visibly associated with the element it is referring to. The first few moments of using a new software are delicate, prone to overwhelming frustration.
Mechanics (or features) must be taught in a linear manner as they support each other. It’s more important to prioritize foundational knowledge than it is to prioritize conceptually simple knowledge.