GAM713: Experimental Game Design

Initial Concepting:

In this module, the main focal point is the many different axes of experimentation.

The initial concept phase of this project is the blue sky approach... I went as broad as I could with this.

-Stretch and Squash movement tech based on stretching and squashing.

-Frog Game.

-Sea farming game.

-Muay Thai combat system.

-Racing meets Portal.

-Splatoon immersive sim.

-Vivid dreamscape game - making a game that tries to emmulate vivid dreams.

-Failure game - game that makes failure the winstate (trying to push past the boundaries of a roguelite).

-Game set inside the windows desktop, move platforms by dragging windows around. --Different applications can have differing effects.

-Game based on playing with toys - Toy Box.

-Clean up game - Top down clean them up.

-Survival boat game.

-Ocean weather system.

-Turn based pirate game.

-Car building (Kerbal Space like).

-Hitman builder.

-FPS - boss rush, exponential power Increase, every boss becomes a common enemy

-Survival horror driving game.

-Vampire Survivors Like - In which death gives you a new envoy.

-Viva Pinata - Converting this game into a Player Controlled environment where players can actually live.

-Game where you can switch from top down to sidescroller.

-Fighting/Eating Disorder Game - A fighting game based around the preparation of real fighting competitions and the ways that fighters develop eating disorders and other mental health issues.

-Football Manager style Excel game focusing on managing a fight gym.

Although I felt like there were a few more experimental ideas, I picked my 2 favourites: Stretch and Squash, as well as a spiritual successor to Viva Pinata... Why these two? I felt that some of the more experimental games would require a longer development time to get to a proof of concept and as these modules essentially last 6 weeks I felt that I could make a more streamlined game with the 2 ideas detailed.

Stretch and Squash~

Stretch and Squash is a co op puzzler where both players control a unique character: One that can stretch, the other that can squash. In my head, I feel like there could be some very unique player combinations and movement tech.

Viva Pinata~

Viva Pinata is a very unique game, one that I believe there is a gap in the market for in todays market. I think it's also a very apt time to look into these kinds of games because of the Pal World popularity and subsequent controversy.

After research, I decided to move forward with my Viva Pinata spiritual successor. Boiled down, the most interesting feature of Viva Pinata is its creature design and the way they interact with each other. This inspired me however, I envisioned a cozy-style game that's subverted toward pet grief. I want to find a way to delve into player morality as well, looking into how players empathise with virtual characters and how players can take the route that's more morally grey.

The build would be in Unreal Engine and would still have some farming elements. The creatures would be animals that are biologically mixed with food like a Snake/Noodle and Melon/Lion. The player would make tough decisions for monetary gain to keep their farm afloat. There would be a mechanic where once an animal has hit it's life expectancy you could choose to send it to a retirement home where you can keep its personality, stats etc. Or send it to a restaurant where you would financially be rewarded. Players could choose to sacrifice certain unliked animals in order to give a better life to their favourites.

Twine Prototyping

Unfortunately, 2 weeks were wasted due to illness, looking at the timeline with under 4 weeks I felt that what I had initially scoped was just not possible in the timeframe. I wanted to utilise this module as an opportunity to retune my skills in Unreal Engine as it has been a while since I had last finished an Unreal project. However, I rescoped my project to be a 2d Unity game focused on one animal rather then creating multiple different animals. I also felt by subtracting this element I could focus on the dynamic between player and pet more.

I began designing the Melion creature, this would be a Melon/Lion creature. I immediately fell into a blocker however...

My artistic prowess...

After consideration and conversations with my lecturers. For the purposes of this experimental game Ai art would be a way to further increase my experimentation into empathy and pet grief. So I thought I would try Ai using the prompt "Make a pixel art lion that's biologically a watermelon" and this image was generated.

After seeing it it was very clear that it would be quite a shell shock to go back to the initial design, so I decided to use this and put it into piskel to which I edited it slightly and gave it an animation.

I found the reaction to the art fairly interesting as people almost gave this sprite a character:

"when players are suppressed from controlling a character or the cognitive load of playing the game is low, the players may start to affectively simulate the character (especially if affects are implicated by expressions or voice of the player character and the process is thus started with affective mimicry)"[Lankoski, 2007] I perceive what Lankoski is saying that players will create there own idealisations of characters when there are more implied details about a character. As this was such a fast process, I decided to utilise more of my time to create a lion cub version. This was done using the same prompt "Make a pixel art lion cub that's biologically a watermelon" until I found one that thematically matched my Melion.

This was the design. I then took this one into Piskel to make it more like the adult, as well as fixing the clear Ai errors.

I find twine a very useful tool. I managed to have a working prototype very quickly. The idea was to have a Hub in which the player would have info displayed.

This prototype helped me reduce a lot of variables that I initially gave arbitrary numbers to. For example health and happiness, due to the way twines if statements work, using lots of cases of variables as in specific ranges, I had to reduce the number on health and happiness to a value out of 5. This worked perfectly as the integer acted as a switch case rather then an arbitrary number.

These switch cases allowed me to have different text displayed depending on the game states.

I used these same switch cases for when the player spends time with their Melion so that players felt that their experience was more personal.

Twine Playtests

The twine prototype was a very successful affirmation for what I wanted the player to feel. My main focal points of the test were fostering an emotional connection with the player and making the player feel remorse for not spending time with their pet. Using a think aloud protocol for the playtest I could decipher the exact moments players felt affection toward their pet. Although the line of debt was fairly arbitrary at this point I noticed players would weigh up their options trying to almost game the system "Okay so I think I have enough money to not go into debt so I'm going to play with him". I noticed that players were immediately focused on money over their pet. This was due to the harsh money and bills system that never really gave an inch to players. My idea for the unity build is to give the player a greater starting account so that they can focus on building a connection with their pets first and then have a rewards curve that slowly increases costs. After players had finished their playtest, I noticed that they would still call their Melion by name as if it were real. "Players are likely to empathize only when they make an intentional effort to do so as the game begins." [Belman,2010]

I felt that these players that were still using their pet names were making an intentional effort to empathise with the situation. During twine playtests there were 2 types of player, the players that were open to empathizing and the players that never invested into the game. Players that never invested immediately found ways to 'game the system' ignoring their pet and trying to make as much money as possible. Players that were open to empathizing were more conscious of taking care of their pet. This was something I clearly envisioned and is an issue with empathy games as players who don't open themselves up to empathize tend not to fully immerse themselves. I found that this was a very similar effect to a trend in Pokémon games called the Nuzlocke, this ruleset that players play the game with considers any fainted Pokémon "dead", "The second rule, where he considered any fainted Pokémon as dead applies a Permadeath philosophy caused him to experience not only a game of increased difficulty, but also a game where he now cared deeply for his Pokémon companions and played much more cautiously to ensure their continued safety." [Ruddy,2014]

Watching players play a Pokémon game with the Nuzlocke challenge in which all Pokémon are implied to be dead, I found that players and watchers became emotionally attached to the Pokémon. Pokémon became their own characters rather then just Statistic envoys, players would cheer when a Pokémon survived a near miss and would have significant grief when a Pokémon 'died'. I found this emotional attachment to be similar to the one players experienced during my Twine test.

Through these positive affirmations I could now focus on making a unity build.

Unity Build

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on in this build was not using a dialogue plugin. I could have saved alot of time using a plugin like Yarnspinner. I could have spent more time on the actual design and balancing on this build. The unity build was initially had a lot less emotional resonance, this was due to the lack of overall features that were originally in the Twine build. The twine playtests gave me confidence for a unity build however as the playtests gave me a blueprint to follow to garner an emotional connection between the player and game.

On my mind was Jason Roher's Passage[2007] and it's layered music and themes connected to both life and death. Early choices that felt impactful but ultimately meaningless. These are aspects of the game that I want to take inspiration from.

For the unity build, I took the different points of feedback, from the twine playtest and changed some of the aspects of my design. Players felt that just having one choice to interact with their Melion wasn't enough, so I added more interactions. I also added different reactions, using particle effects and lines of dialogue too.

I felt that there wasn't a clear progression with bonding so I wanted to have a system that obscured the Melions thoughts until a certain level of bonding had been acquired.

One way I tried to target players that chose not to empathise was by focusing more on players paying off debts. Narratively focusing on that work and making that work monotonous and not fun. This way players would imitate life in a way preferring to spend time with their pets over work because it's more fun and visually stimulating.

I kept the idea of aging from the twine prototype, with your Melion transforming after spending enough time in game with them. And I made a menu that showed the players money, debt, interactions and slight hints as to the melion's feelings toward the player.

Post Mortem

Reducing scope affected the emotional poignancy in a positive manner. The art of subtracting elements so that the core concept shines through has changed the project drastically. Initially the original project had a clear target audience for players of the original Viva Pinata, I was just looking at a gap in the market. However through prototyping and playtest I steered closer and closer to what players resonated with and the game ultimately became a game about grief. In producing this idea, I realised that it closely correlated mechanically to a romance game, in the GDC: Kindness Coins, or Chemistry Casino: A New Take On Romantic-Sexual Narrative Design, the game loop in that you insert "kindness coins" into a character and they illicit a romantic response. I feel like the best emotional stories come from systemic games, players illicit responses of grief in these systemic games as death is usually permanent in these games. Players choose to empathise with characters and build an image of a characters personality through reading the implied characteristics.

I found that the biggest difference between the Unity and Twine builds was the interfacing with the player. A lot of the characters unique traits per run were obscured to the player in the unity build. I found players had a more personal attachment to the twine build because there was more feedback, and although there were less unique responses in the twine build, they were more obvious to the player and so they stuck to the players for longer.

If I were to continue the project in Unity, I would focus on interfacing with the player. I wouldn't necessarily add more content, I would just make the content more obvious to the player. I would continue to have the mounting pressure of debt, and add some kind of fail state because it is currently mechanically meaningless.

Had I started the project now with the knowledge I had gained from the 6 weeks of development, I would still have developed a twine prototype, this was so important to the overall project as I went into the unity build with the knowledge of the most important aspects of the game. I would however, use a plugin like fungus or yarn spinner for the unity build as I think in trying to cut corners not using plugins, too much time was spent creating dialogue systems that already exist in these plugins. That time could have been spent perfecting dialogue and making the interfacing more obvious.

Overall I learnt a lot in this module, I feel I can more confidently make games that lean more toward the Avant Garde. Prototyping again was a major part of this module and it helped me a lot in figuring out what this game is actually about. I don't think I've had a project where the core had changed so much but this one certainly did.

I'm certainly excited to take this knowledge into the group project where I will be developing a puzzle game, a genre I haven't been fortunate enough to design for yet.

Ludography

Viva Pinata. (2006). PC [Game]. Rare.

Pokemon Black and White. (2010). Nintendo DS[Game]. Game Freak.

Passage. (2007). PC[Game]. Jason Roher.

Bibliography

Lankoski, P., (2007). Goals, affects, and empathy in games. Philosophy of computer games

Belman, J. (2010). Designing Games to Foster Empathy.

Isbister, K., 2016. How games move us: Emotion by design. Mit Press.

Ruddy, H., (2014). The Resurrection of Permadeath: An analysis of the sustainability of Permadeath use in Video Games. Master of Science Interactive Digital Media Program, University of Dublin. Ireland.

Nay, J.L. and Zagal, J.P., (2017), August. Meaning without consequence: virtue ethics and inconsequential choices in games. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-8).

Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of

Videogames. Cambridge: The MIT Press

Cordova, D.I., and Lepper, M.R. (1996). Intrinsic motivation and the process of learning: beneficial effects of hypercontextualization, personalization, and choice.

Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(4), 715-730.

Messick, D.M. and McClintock, C.G., (1968). Motivational bases of choice in experimental games. Journal of experimental social psychology, 4(1), pp.1-25.

Michelle Clough (2022) Kindness coins, or Chemistry Casino: A new take on romantic-sexual narrative design, GDC. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlyH_NAs3f0&t=739s