Studio II: Signal Project
Today we worked on the theme. We initially decided that we did not want to work on grief anymore and decided to focus on social isolation as our main theme for the story. We discussed ways we could portray social isolation within a visual context and came up with the idea to tell a story day after day where the protagonist would wake up and go on their day to day routine but slowly as each day past the city environment they walked through would slowly change into a forest which we chose because it is somewhere isolated from society. We came up with a look of the character being in a hoodie and jeans as we wanted the character to show no identity because we wanted the player to interpret the protagonist as they would see them. We then discussed how it would be played but ran into an issue with the cycling days. We felt as though someone who picked up this game and started to play would not understand what was going on and when they reached the point of the next day thinking that that was the end of the experience and not bothering to continue on with it as we chose not to show any text throughout the experience at all.
So we then went back and discussed grief and came up with the idea of using the five stages of grief within one level but shown through mechanics rather than through storytelling. The five stages of grief being denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.Â
With denial, we came up with the idea to create a mob character that can be attacked but when attacked would hurt you but really that mob would never even attempt to hurt you. We even came up with the idea of making this character look harmless as well hence the wittle griever in the photo. We thought it showed denial through the thought process of questioning yourself. e.g. Should I have attacked it? Would it hurt me? Maybe it was supposed to help me?
For Anger, we explored the idea of having a mob character that was not wanting to harm the player but to annoy the player to feel anger. So the mob character was a mob that would constantly push the character as they were platforming through the level to start the feel angry from being constantly pushed while attempting jumps. Obviously, the angry mob could not be killed either to further be annoying to the player.
For Bargaining we came up with the idea of a give and take sort of choice like you have to sacrifice something to gain something since bargaining in terms of grief is having to let go to move on. We thought of maybe having to give up some of your life points to be able to progress could be that form of giving and take.
For Depression we explored the idea of having a “boss fight” of the player battling a shadow form of themselves as with depression your always constantly fighting with yourself to get through everyday to be able to continue on so we thought that would be a great way of portraying that in the form of a battle with yourself.
For Acceptance with tossed between the idea of allowing the shadow part of yourself to live or to remove it as it showed a form of acceptance through knowing that's apart of you and continuing on with that shadow or killing it and letting go. Either one is a form of acceptance but because they are two different choices of acceptance we thought of just leaving that up to player choice.
We felt like we made great strides today with coming up with these ideas and feel they could work well with telling a story of grief by facing grief instead.
