The interpretation you have of my game is
more important than what I intended. Ideally, you should play the game before
reading this statement.
I am a 20 year old games designer with
aspirations of working in the industry, either in games journalism or design.
Games are something I have been passionate about since the first time I was
allowed to play them, but I am very new to this whole ‘games creation’ process.
I have to admit, this is the first game that I am truly proud of designing.
The inspiration for this game came from,
more or less, my disdain with my former ideas and my frustration and the
inability to think of one that I’d be happy with. I decided to resign myself to
my trampoline until I could think of an idea, but after 20 minutes I still didn’t
have one. I eventually gave up my attempt to focus my mind and let it wander. A
bird wandered into my view, onto the tree above me. I lay there staring at it,
“How much easier would life be for a bird compared to me,” I wondered, “Would
it even be that much easier?” A few more moments passed. “If I were you, I’d
flap my wings and fly into the distance and explore for the rest of my life… Is
that something a bird would do?”
Then it struck me. This is my idea. I could
use the concept of a bird’s life to represent trust within a game. From there,
the game slowly evolved from a game about leaving your parents nest, finding a
mate and then having and protecting chicks of your own to what it is now: a
game about finding a lonely bird and deciding whether or not to sacrifice your
food and probably your life to raise and protect it. Quite a leap, I know, but
these changes were necessary for a number of reasons, ranging from time
constraints to some mechanics being irrelevant to the overall goal: creating a
game about trust.
At first, I felt like a mate would be
essential to the goal of the project, and our team thought we’d have a mate in
the game for the first 2 weeks of the project. The project changed drastically
after a proper analysis of the term ‘trust’. What is trust, really? From there,
what would genuinely help represent trust within our game? Firstly, if your
character has a child then you are most likely going to feel obligated to
protect it. Why would you feel otherwise? There is no real reason to betray the trust, and as I’ve learned, providing the
ability to betray trust doesn’t always make sense. There must be some type of
reason to do so. To help combat this lack of incentive, we decided that the
best course of action was to remove the concept of family from the game. People
will automatically pick their family in a game because it’s the right thing to
do. Instead of having a baby bird in the game that you feel obligated to
protect, we made it so that you simply stumble across this bird and have to
decide by yourself whether or not it is worth sacrificing your potential as a
bird to help this chick survive.
As for removing the mate from the game,
that was largely a matter of re-scoping. We decided that the necessity of
having a mate vs impact that it would have on the game wasn’t large enough to
keep it in the game, especially when it would increase the amount of work we’d
have to do. In our minds we’d rather spend more time on the important
mechanics, like the chick, than overscope and end up not being able to create a
game that represents trust accurately. After all, that is the goal. At times it
has been hard to remember that the reason we’re creating this game is not to
create a fun, mechanically sound game, but rather to emanate trust in the player
through the gameplay. On this level, I feel this project has been successful.
We maintained sight of overarching goal and have expressed trust in an accurate
way.
Before we, (the designers,) began pitching
and recruiting people for our project, we were given some constraints that
would help us narrow down the type of game we were to create. These were
specific to the audio of the game and the style of the game. The audio we were
asked to inspire our music off of were: Ennio Morricone’s The Mission soundtrack,
The Necks’ Drive By soundtrack, Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa I, Gyorgy Ligeti’s Lux
Aeterna soundtrack and finally, Lamb’s Between Darkness and Wonder soundtrack. For
our particular project we decided to go with Ennio Morricone’s The Mission
soundtrack and our audio guys, Justin Vincent and Michael Pearse have delivered
wonderfully on that. The music we have for this game sounds very inspired by
this type of music and we are very proud to have such a successful attempt at
this style of music implemented into the game. You will have heard that music
in the game and it is my hope that you would feel the same. Ennio Morricone’s
music was a great inspiration during the level design and gameplay discussions
and definitely helped shaped the game.
On the graphics side of the spectrum, we
had to pick between the 5 images you can see below, and then base our cosmetic
design choices off of it. I picked the top right image, “HENRYSTUARTP.O.W”, as
I felt it delivered on the geometric, cartoonish and low poly style environment
that I had originally envisioned when the game was just a vision I had in my
mind. As you’ve played the game I hope you can see the similarities between the
picture and our own in-game style. The textures from this image are somewhat more
detailed than what we have delivered in our game, but I still feel that the
resemblance is clear and it is quite obvious that of the 5 pictures available,
it is clearly the one we inspired our design off of.
Knowing all of the decisions that went into
creating the game, obviously the game plays differently to myself and the rest
of our team than it does to other people who play it, which was obvious in all
playtests that we set up. Still though, I feel the steady progression we made,
from an early prototype about a bird that can fly around a map and chirp, to a
game where you chirp to make a bird follow you, to what we have now, was quite
successful, if not satisfying for us as a team. After the first playtest we received
a lot of feedback, mostly negative, usually something along the lines of, “Hey,
the flying is fun and the game looks nice, but I had no idea what I was doing.”
This is largely due to the early decision I and the rest of the team agreed on;
there would be no in-game text. As it turns out, this particular constraint
caused a lot of headaches for our team and is likely the most painful design
constraint I’ve ever set myself, but I feel I’m a better designer for it now
than I was before. Some issues we had with this constraint was explaining how
to play the game without explicitly giving the player instructions. Eventually
we settled on having chirps that showed emotions. We also added a worm above
the player’s head when they were hungry, and changed the colour of the screen
when the player ate, making it more colourful and saturated. To add to this, we
experimented with the different graphics that the bird would chirp and settled
on love hearts and smiley faces, but originally we had traffic lights and even
just plane happy and sad faces. These types of things that you have to think
about when you give yourself constraints, I feel at least, are very healthy for
you as a designer, and like I mentioned, I feel like a better designer for it.
Overall, this is probably the project I’ve
worked on that I am proudest of, certainly the most successful as far as
content and aesthetics go. It is probably the favourite of all of the idea’s
that I’ve had and I feel like it successfully fulfilled the criteria we were
constrained with. (Which was to create a game about trust.) The idea of trust
is a very ambiguous one but with time and thought, we began to understand and
develop our understanding of it, which helped us to create a better game. We
were met with many challenges throughout this project, like collaborating with
students and setting constraints that we didn’t necessarily need to for the
greater good, but overall these challenges have hopefully changed us for the
better and future games from us will be to an even higher quality. Fingers
crossed.
Thank you for taking the time to read my artist statement and I sincerely hope the game resounded with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment