Overview:
As a final-year project at Teesside University, I designed and implemented a game concept in the Unity 4 engine that involved using a Playstation 4 controller. It was a personal project; so all the backgrounds, scripting and game design work were done by me. You can watch a gameplay video later in this post.
Why should you care? In an industry dominated by violent and stressful gameplay, this project explores the viability of a game based around problem solving using our social and emotional intelligence. Gameplay emerges when the player interacts with a character by expressing emotions in real-time, while considering the character’s responses to get the desired behaviour.
(When I was asked to do a project, I seized the opportunity to create something I’m personally passionated about and push myself with something that would really put me outside my comfort zone. Creatively, this project has been challenging, but to the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has ever been made before.)
Design and Development:
I want to see a game where the story and gameplay are so tightly connected, that without the other, neither of them would exist. A game where the play is a story about social relationships. This was the goal I gave myself for this project. A goal I felt would help games communicate more about people’s relationship with each other, instead of the primal violence that is usually depicted.
The first design problem I had to overcome, and the most fundamental one, was how do we create gameplay that can also work as a story about characters? The key to solving this problem comes when we realise that the way we understand and empathise with characters in stories is through our social and emotional intelligence. Now, if we design gameplay that challenges the player in this intelligence, we’ll have gameplay that naturally works as a story, because there is no conflict between gameplay and story – they’re the same. (You can read more about emotional character interaction in my dissertation.)
Flames Surround Me is designed to challenge the player’s social and emotional intelligence. The reason for this is that it encourages greater emotional involvement. Because the player is actively trying to understand the motivations of characters, the chance of emotional responses increases.
The way it challenges the player is by giving the player; (1) a way to express himself, (2) a character with different ways of expressing itself and (3) a desired “goal” behaviour. The challenge comes from reading the character and responding appropriately to get the desired goal behaviour. This is theatrically valid because the player has an objective (which is provable), and plays an action in pursuit of that objective, while overcoming the obstacle-conflict.
In the case of this game, the goal behaviour was left open so that the player can decide for herself if she wants the dog in the game to follow her or to go away. This open structure demonstrates the “infinite” possibilities, and stories, a system like this can create.
There was a lot of C# scripting involved in this project, but another design problem I came across was how do we balance the character’s responses? I decided to use a technique that is often used in item-drop systems to make sure that the player doesn’t get the same item-drop over and over again.
The way this technique works is by assigning a value to every action. This value represents the probability of that action being chosen again. It will drastically decrease if the action is chosen and slowly increase if it is not. This really helped the artificial intelligence to not repeat an action too often, which made the character more believable.
Please watch in HD.
As demonstrated in the video; the dog will react to the actions performed by the player. You can see how the dog’s personality is expressed through algorithms. This was achieved by using an algorithm that interprets the player’s input and a finite-state machine where each state describes a different action or behaviour for the dog’s artificial intelligence. This way, everything that happens in the story is a result of the player’s input. This project serves as a proof of concept for a game about social relationships.
In fact, the project was selected to be displayed at ExpoTees, an exhibition celebrating students’ work. And the feedback was amazing, both from young and surprisingly old players. (A couple in their 60′s who have never played video-games before, was able to play it 'till the end and loved it!)
I hope this project has given some game designers the initial tools, inspiration and courage to explore games that discuss people’s relationship with each other. Perhaps it could even change the way we tell stories in games.