"We are better when we work together"
After having a group discussion about our themes and the ideas that were stemming out of our individual themes, we all agreed on making something that had some sort of moral value to it. We all liked the moral of working together and helping each other. The reason why we chose that was because it reflects one of the big issues of the modern day society where people are closer than ever (because of technology) but there is still a disconnect between everyone and often people would not want to communicate with people in person but rather connect with people online. There is a lack of closeness which leads to people not wanting to work together and building relations. This issue also occurs in politics and bigger world problems, where we should be working together on things like climate change, building up healthier relationships with other countries by being more open about other cultures and accepting people as who they are.
We did some brainstorming on this theme and found some interesting points:
Friendship, Love and Acceptance - {Accepting failure, Mutual respect, Accepting differences, Joint experiences}
Adapting - {Synchronization, Combining skills, Different personalities coming together}
Teamwork & Communication - {Sharing information, Listening to each other, Working in harmony}
Learning to ask for help - {Community, Personal journey, Learning from others, Patience}
Remaining an individual in a community - {Giving, Diversity, Learning self sufficiency, Different but together}
These were some of the key points we explored. This really helped get our minds focus towards different ideas around our key moral theme. Abbie has quite a lot of experience in creative writing and narrative design prior to university and she explained us about the different plot structures that exist in writing and showed us a video.
This was important to us because we wanted our game to have a simple but rich narrative which Abbie would be working on and it also gave us a direction as to how our game would be structured in terms of gameplay. We chose the plot structure of a "Man in Hole" as it was simple and seemed like the best way to convey a moral. This narrative structure basically consisted of a protagonist starting at a good spot, then having a fall and then learning from the mistakes and getting back up again.
Story in a Story
Our first initial idea was to have a game where there was a story in a story (kind of like What remains of Edith Finch). We wanted the player to go through a world which can be easily maneuvered but was filled with dialogues and interactive elements. The player would walk around trading stories and solving puzzles while finding its way back home, but the stories that are being told by the player uncovers the journey that the player went on and it learned from it. It seemed like a brilliant idea to us and we started working on simple paper and digital prototypes:
For the paper prototype, we wanted to design one of the old school "View Master's" that allows you to have a slideshow of images that often are in a comic style and usually tells some sort of story. In the video above, we designed a paper prototype in which we have a base frame that has a standard environment, and different disks that you can flick through, each with a unique environment. The idea was to showcase the player being in an environment and being able to play through different stories/levels.
On the other hand, we were developing our idea of the environment and the structure that our story might follow. Abbie designed a narrative prototype which covered how the player would start and end his adventure. She covered details of her thought process behind that and the narrative she worked on, on her blog [Abbie's blog]. Kerris worked on visualizing this idea by making an environment concept that was inspired by all of our discussions.
After looking into Kerris' design, we discussed how we could use the idea of having different islands as a part of our environment prototype. We all agreed that showing a tightly bonded community through stacked houses on an island seemed like a good idea. Abbie fused the idea of Kerris' concept art and her narrative structure and made another environment concept that explained our idea even better. It showed where the gameplay would start, how the character would possibly
interact with the world and make progress, and where the gameplay would end.
After coming up with the concept and designing the story for this prototype, Abbie also came up with some character concepts for it which we all really loved.
Later on, me and Abbie tested the story and the idea with her family to get a feedback and they came up with a tonne of plot holes and faults in our design of the prototype. Within the narrative of the story, the main character would tell the one story in parts to different people but the people who have heard the first half don't get to hear the rest of the story and the people who hear the second half don't really get to hear the first part and the third part. The feedback was crucial to our idea development as we never thought that we were making these design mistakes and this feedback made it so we get a chance to iterate the idea and make it better.
We had Emma Joy Reay as our guest lecture for the day and she gave us a lecture on "Representation of child characters in Video Games". Me and Abbie got to talk to her after the lecture was over and discuss our iterated version of the game idea which covered most of the plot holes that we had. Emma's input was very important as she gave us a different perspective to our ideas. Instead of random people in the game, now our character went around talking and communicating with people while telling the story to a kid that travels with us.
For further iteration and development of this idea, go to this post:
Octopus Librarian
Kerris came up with the character design of octopus librarian which instantly clicked and we all got excited about it. It just seemed fun to think about a grumpy octopus who owns the library and is obsessed with organisation. We started to develop it into a mini game where your goal is to keep the library organised and clean as an impulsive kid is going around creating a mess. For more detail into the narrative of this prototype check out Abbie's blog on this.
In the main prototype blog for this, I would be talking more about the design decisions that I made and the iterations I did during prototyping this idea in Unity.
Co-op Idea
After we got feedback on Abbie's main theme, it was very obvious that people really enjoyed the idea of a game based on working together and it would have been a missed opportunity to not have worked on a cooperative game idea where people have to work in harmony to achieve a goal. We looked into lots of games like Spring Falls.
We wanted something simple that is relaxing but fun for this idea and we decided on making a coral development game idea where you would stack up reef blocks in a specific color sequence and make a little community together with your friends and family. We made some basic rules for the game which were as follows:
- Each person is given a pile of blocks of one color, there is an extra pile of blocks of a third color
- They have to build a tower together but cannot place two of their own blocks on top of each other
- One of every five blocks has to be of the third color, either player can place this block
- Another iteration: they have to get rid of their blocks as fast as possible but still adhere to the world rules.