Concept Challenge

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Together with four classmates I did the Concept Challenge where we got a randomized narrative that we had to build a game around. What we came up with was a 2D platform game for mobile devices. I'm going to share the presentation here with you together with the first part from our development diary.

Tuesday 30th

The first thing we needed to do was to create a story to build our game around. We decided that we were going to generate a random story through a writing exercise. The process started with getting a paper and letting everyone in the group write for 30 seconds and then passing the paper around. For example Rasmus started writing his story and then passed it along to Tom after 30 seconds, who then both read and continued the story. But before passing it to Sigrid he had to fold down what Rasmus had written so she only read Tom’s part of the story before continuing the writing. Because of that no one knew the entire story or what the others had written except the one before them.

Having done the exercise we got four different stories,  we decided to take one of them that was random but still consistent. The story was about a tree, possessed by the devil who eats children.We started thinking about how we could make that story into a narrative and build a game around it. So we decided to make one of the children the main character of the game instead of playing as the tree or something evil. We started discussing what mechanics our game needed in order to fit the story. The conclusion was to make a 2D platformer game for mobile devices.

We decided to make it a mobile game since this is not something you usually find on App Store, Spooky Tree have a deeper story and feels darker and creepier than for example Candy Crush or Farmville. But it could still be something that you casually play when you want to pass time. You could play our game while you are on the bus or the train or when you are laying in bed having a hard time falling asleep. It is not a hardcore game nor something we expect people will play for six hours straight.

The deadline for the game idea is Wednesday next week so we do not want to stress with it and to really take our time. Also so we have time to focusing on other school work we have other than this assignment. We could have decided to do it fast and just get over with it but since we had time we wanted to really do our best and work with our ideas. Our group also decided to write small notes about what we did each day. Later on we wrote down in this diary what accomplished and described more into detail what we had decided and why we made those choices.

Impending Doom

We got an assignment about designing an impending doom game and writing an essay about the game we wanted to make. I just finished my essay and sent it in and thought I should share it here on my blog too.

Under the knife

When the player starts up the game the character is lying on an autopsy table in a quiet, white room in a mortuary. The player can look around in the room but is unable to move any limbs or talk. Some unidentifiable person enters the room, picks up a scalpel and starts the necropsy on the body right in front of the player’s eyes. The player is given a few choices, trying to move their legs, arms or trying to speak up. In the top corner of the screen the player is watching the character losing blood while being cut open.

Game play

In Fundamentals of Game Design(Ernest Adams, 2014) it says “Games provide gameplay, that is challenges and actions that entertain. People enjoy a challenge, as long as they can reasonably expect to accomplish it”. I wanted to create a gameplay where you are given a few choices where the player might think that they could survive by doing these actions in a specific order. Of course there is no possible way that the player could survive in this nerve-racking scenario but I want to engender the feeling that in some kind of way the player could make the character speak up or show that they are still alive.

But since the gameplay is very graphical it is going to be hard for the player to make the decisions. How are they going to react? Will they try different combinations of these actions and losing more blood faster or will they try to stay calm while playing it and only trying to talk during the autopsy? The player should not know that it is an impending doom game. Therefor I want more actions to be added after they have struggled with the three actions that are available in the beginning. For example after the player has tried to move their legs for five times they now are also given the action to try to move their feet. And after that they can try to move their toes. The player is slowly trying to get back the control over their body and it is working, slowly they can feel more of their body and try to control it but the time is running out. Of course it is not working in the end but it will give the feeling to the player that they maybe could survive it if they just were a little bit faster or made the right choices right from the beginning. Every move the character makes they lose more blood, the more they get control over their body the faster they are going to die. There is no win-situation.

Fun

In Adam Mayes presentation Introduction week 2.1 MDA he talked about fun and how different games could fun to play in different ways. There are 8 different kinds of fun, for example sensation, fantasy and fellowship. It is hard to fit in an impending doom game under any of these fun genres since it is very short and does not have a lot of story. But I believe “Under the knife” is more of a challenge game, as there is a main goal that the player must try to achieve by timing, doing actions and critical thinking. The player must think twice before pressing any button. They have to be critical towards everything they make the character do. I strive towards that the player would want to replay it more than once to try to survive and to try out other strategies. The game could also fit under sensation; I want the game to feel very realistic and beautiful in that way. If the game was not in 3D or not from a first person perspective it would lose the charm and the experience would not be the same.

Story and setting

Neither the setting nor the story is important. Why the character is lying on that table in the beginning could be for various reasons. They mistook the character for dead or someone kidnaped them and now is going to sell their organs on the black market. Maybe it is some sadistic murder that drugged the character. It is up to the player to decide why they are there but I hope they will focus on trying to get up or scream to survive. Not wonder why the character is in a mortuary.

For me this is an impending doom, it is slow but inevitable. The player is seeing what is happening right in front of them and they are giving the possibility to do something but the body does not respond. As player you cannot make the right choice to survive. It will make the player frustrated and give a feeling of being helpless. It does not matter how hard they try or if they just accept what is going to happen. In the end the character is being cut open from a first person point of view and the player have to watch it. The character will pass out from pain and die from blood loss and the player could not do anything to save them.  

07.09.14

It's soon 10 o'clock on a Sundays night. And I'm sitting in front of my laptop with coffee and a pile of books. I have realised that some of my classmates have started using their blogs to actually write about school and what we have learnt the first week so I thought I would do it too. First of all, this week have been so fast, I can't believe week 2 of being a game design student is starting tomorrow. It's both exciting but also very frightening.
     I haven't really talked anything about myself, I came to GAME directly from high school so everything is new. I'm not used to having lectures and having this much responsibility over my schoolwork. Not only university is new for me, the whole thing about having my own apartment, living by myself, having to pretend to be a grown up. I moved to Gotland two weeks and I still gets lost on my way home. So it's not weird that I'm feeling on edge, this is a new place with a lot of new people. It's scary and I feel so young, small in this world but I know I'm in the right place, this is what I have wanted to do for a while now.
     This program was first on my application for university, why I picked Uppsala University I can't explain. I just knew I had to go here. I'm glad that everything I did in school helped me to end up here. Like most of my classmates games is a big interest. But apart from games I love art, fashion, architecture, films, everything that have something with design to do. I believe it's easier for a game designer to not only be interested in games and can find inspiration from walking in a museum or looking at the catwalk. Where I am today I can't program anything at all, I hardly know how games works. But that's changing.
     The first weeks lectures have been about taking games apart, trying to see the objects and how everything works in a relationship. It's the first step to understanding game systems, I'm trying to read as much as I can to make sure I understand the basics. That reminds me that I should stop writing and going back to study some more before I have to go to bed. About this blog, I'm gonna try to write something once a week about myself and how I'm doing in school. Other posts is gonna be more about my assignments and hopefully I can share some of my work here.