ETEC 544 individual reflection for final project

The final assignment that consists of four parts perfectly demonstrated how to learn a new concept, a tool, game design in a form of group project:

1)      literature review to lay the theoretic foundation; help students understand the guidelines on how to design a game from scratch.

2)      Game design: group brainstorm session for storyline writing

3)      Choose game design media (Twine, for our group) and gamify the concept/story/purpose of the game.

4)      Testing, debug, presentation, sharing, feedback instructor and peers.

We are all first time Twiner! Start from reading sample twine games, we build the whole game from scratch. While Twine is designed to be user-friendly, those who are unfamiliar with programming like us found it challenging to grasp the mechanics of creating interactive stories, e.g. how to quantify “energy level”. So the learning curve is definitely steep.

It is also complicated to implement conditional logic and variables. Game designer may struggle with creating branching narratives or managing state changes throughout the story.

Regarding design and styling, achieving a polished look may require additional skills and time to pick proper music, background pictures, videos etc as supporting media content to make it more engaging. When we finished the draft, it requires testing to debug any logic hiccups and export for sharing. The presentation step, including deck preparation, allows to look back the whole project, what has been done and what can be done, what we could have done better. The purpose of the project is not to compete which game is more polished but on the basis to include all key elements of game, i.e. gameplay mechanics (objective, rule based, competition, control, individual/multiplayer, feedback system (scoring, win/lose), visual system and audio cues, challenges, theme & narrative, replayable, interaction), we learn how to create a game for certain educational purpose by bridging the gap between academic study and real world implementation.

Creating a compelling narrative that engages players can be difficult. Balancing branching paths and ensuring coherence in the storyline requires careful planning. We brainstormed in our weekly meeting for the storylines and drafted three stories happening in puberty, 20s and middle age to represent key life events. Balancing choices can be difficult. How to ensure that player feel meaningful when follow our storyline and making choices can be difficult. We, as designers must carefully consider how different paths affect the narrative and player experience. Twine is primarily a storytelling tool, so how to implement gameplay mechanics posts challenges for creative turnarounds which also make the game more engaging.

Our draft is basic, yet huge efforts have been put in due to first time Twine users. Twine needs practice and patience. If time allows, we could add more elements such as music, background, better manage variables and states to track player choices and actions, offer players more choices and even upgrade to multiplayer model to connect with the community on an anonymous basis.

The game we created is non-gender specific and focus on mental health issues. The purpose of the game is clear – players experience ups and downs emotional rollercoaster via RPG style story flow and test himself the energy level, i.e. you score if make certain choices. While there is no right or wrong, win or lose in this game, this “non-compete” game posts higher requirement of visual design and audio supports to make it more game-alike, i.e. engaging, replayable and competing.

“Beyond the shadows” falls into adventure or process oriented/similation game style by definition of Espen Aarseth who characterize game as action game, adventure, strategy and process-oriented/similation.

When we discussed the game, one concerning point I pointed out is it may look against what Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman who advocated the role of play as “conflict, rules, quantifiable action”. The conflict elements look subtle, which make it less gamey. We tried to mitigate this issue by quantifying energy level, i.e. player score “heart” to experience the positive energy could turn out different results from what they might choose in real life.

 

Reference:

1. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S., Smith, J. H., & Tosca, S. P. (2020;2019;). Understanding video games: The essential introduction (4th ed.). Milton: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429431791 – Read chapter entitled: “What is a Game?”
2. Fullerton, T. (2014). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, NY: Taylor & Francis (CRS Press)/ Chapters 1, 2, 3.