Spoils of War - Exegesis
We were assigned to create a game that holds an emotional message or response and have the experience differ from each player’s experience. The team, Light Horse Studios created Spoils of War to ideally portray what Australian Tunnelers went through during the Great War. The team aimed to create this experience for the player through everything seen and heard in the game.
We were able to achieve these goals of creating the experience of Tunnelers during the Great War through gameplay mechanics, the audio dialogue introduction, the art style of the art assets and user interface and audio.
The gameplay mechanics, in my opinion was the most important method to portray the experience of what Australian Tunnelers could do during the Great War. Spoils of War contains three classes or units which are the Digger, Fighter and Listener. By using any character, the character had to be able to dig, run, fight, listen and plant explosives but each class had better skills in certain areas compared to the other classes.
By giving the playable characters these action mechanics it gives somewhat of a real representation of actions or things Tunnelers could do. Other mechanics also played a big role to help portray the experience which and they were the Fog of War, Timed Objective and Environmental Factors and Enemy Artificial Intelligence mechanics.
The Fog of War mechanic was used to portray how a tunneler would put their ears against the wall with a listening device and be able to hear anything on the other side. With Spoils of War, Fog of War was used to see more of the environment. All classes were able to see through the Fog of War but the Listener class was able to see through more compared to the other two classes. This was more so a design choice and we needed to have a reasonable scope for the project.
The Timed Objective mechanic is present to have players act quickly within a time frame, which is ten days in Spoils of War to decide and complete actions and defeat the enemies. This mechanic helps portray how the Tunnelers did during the Great War as time was precious and decisions had to be made quickly. To help the experience of helping the experience of the players having to decide completing actions quickly is through the Enemy Artificial Intelligence because the enemies in the game are unpredictable and requires you to do quick thinking.
Finally, the last mechanic to help portray what Tunnelers went through is with the Environmental Factors mechanic. As in real life, tunnels have the potential to collapse without support or have low oxygen levels which is what this mechanic adds into the game. It further adds a better understanding of the environment Tunnelers were in.
The audio dialogue introduction, also known as the Mission Debrief is an audio dialogue that plays before the player begins the game. The dialogue is between two characters who speak to each other about their objectives and current situation they are in. This dialogue helps players recognize and understand the situations the Tunnelers experienced during the Great War and will teach players what must be done to defeat the enemies once you begin playing. This piece of audio dialogue is very vital because without it, players may only understand what Tunnelers do and not understand the context behind their situation. This section is optionally and can be skipped by the player but we have set it in a way where the audio dialogue will play instantly when the player starts the game and hopefully have the interest of the player and having them listen to the full two minutes of the dialogue.
To help portray the experience we were achieving, we had to use a specific art style for Spoils of War which is a stylized 2D inking art style, utilizing grey pastel colour tones. This art style was used to represent the atmosphere and environment and also to highlight the ‘coldness’ and ‘sadness’ war brings to mind. Each character has a different look to represent their class and at the same time, to make each character personal which is a goal we tried to achieve this but it ends up failing as we were unable to represent the difference between the playable characters and the enemies on screen. For a player, it would be very confusing to see identical characters on both teams.
Initially we wanted to make each character a personal character with a personal background as each team on screen would have six players. The goal was out unfortunately out of scope so we stuck with three classes of characters where the player chooses a total of six consisting of any class. Indirectly, this helped us achieve how we wanted to express teamwork in our game which is what Tunnelers required in order to achieve successful actions such as the Listener spotting an enemy and having the digger dig towards the enemy.
The User Interface was designed to express what Spoils of War is about. In the Main Menu, players would see an image of soldiers in a trench fighting off enemies. It was clear this game is about War, specifically Tunnelers during the Great War. The colour pallet used in the User Interface is mainly brown and yellow and this was to represent the dirtiness and hard work ethics of Tunnelers as they would spend a lot of their time working hard and digging underground.
Different type of audio was used to help achieve our goals. Audio played an important role in the game as it featured theatrical type of music with a feeling of strength and patriotism and other ambient audio such as background noise you would hear in War, sounds such as grenades, gunfire and explosions. The audio is used to represent what War was like and to remind the player what type of environment they are in and most importantly what the Tunnelers went through.
Overall, we were able to express what an Australian Tunneler had to experience during the Great War through the many methods and techniques used in Spoils of War. However, it was clear to see that the immersion and experience be interrupted or ruined because our exhibition build would sometimes show sign of bugs for some players. In the end, it was clear to see we achieved the portrayal of what Australian Tunnelers went through during the Great War in Spoils of War.