#ardn518

[charinar-bct]

#ardn518 - Formal Statements

Contextual

Our interactive experience is a narrative-focused ‘game’ about regret. Because of this, we gained inspiration from other designers and game creators, etc. such as Telltale games and how they're story-oriented and engage their players/audience through narrative experiences, with additional gameplay where the choices made by the players affects the overall experience of the player and possible endings. Others such as You Left Me, Until Dawn, and Life Is Strange were previously made products that were inspirations for me and possibly the others too due to its likelihood to Telltale, where they’re story-driven, and either explored the butterfly effect where even the smallest choice could have an alternatively large consequence, or different endings could occur based on the decisions of the player.

Our game experience, our project matters because it is an interactive experience which allows for conversation and reflection over the regrets that some people may have, because some people may connect with the regrets of the characters within the game, or through this game, it will provoke the players to think about their own regrets. It’s so that players can help others find their regrets and help them to accept their mistakes and either forget, and move on, or realise that despite all efforts, you can’t save or help everybody. There’s is also an educational factor in our game, as it allows for players some insight on how to or not to deal with situations like those within the game.

Reflective

The outcome of my group’s work was a short Unity based game which is focused around the idea and theme of regret, which could be explored through player interactions with characters through dialogue choices.

My contribution to my group mates for Carriage was solely the character design and making for the game sprites. But aside from this, I also searched for information about colour theory and shape theory.

Essentially, the game consists of a main character who is on a purgatory train. As he travels through the different train carriages, he meets and interacts with a series of characters, where there is a chance to either discover and help the characters to let go or accept their regret, or to simply be heartless and not help the regretful person. Each dialogue choice allows for different interactions with the characters, and players do actually have to think carefully about the dialogue choices that they pick for the characters within the purgatory train. The characters are in the purgatory train because their regret is stopping them from moving onwards, and it is the player’s job to either help or ignore them. Those that you succeed in helping, get to leave the purgatory train and move on.

The characters that will be met in the train are a workaholic mother, a teen boy racer, a homeless man, and the main character himself, and with each character are different personalities, triggers for good or bad reactions, etc.

When showing this game to random people, classmates, or other bct members from second year, It was curious to see how they observed the game with no knowledge about what its about or how to play. I observed that a good majority enjoyed the fact that it was a simple click to choose game, and that there were a wide range of dialogue options in terms of formality, ‘realistic’, and thought-provoking dialogue. There were many things that are still in the process of being implemented in our game, such as the full colour animations for each character, sound, etc. but that could be implemented only for showcase, because it’s good that we even have a functional game. I did observe though that the narrative - the dialogue - was something that caused last minute pain for my group, as no one was writing it, or if they were, they were having trouble portraying the character through the text of what they may have discovered which is why I offered to help, but I couldnt..

Anyway, If I were to continue with this game, I would attempt to help with the narrative writing or dialogue writing as that was an aspect that I wanted to explore and help with myself, as I enjoy creative writing, but was never given the chance to for the project as is because it wasn’t my role. The design was my role. It would be very nice if I could also enhance my skills of character design and animation, so as to not affect my team as much since I was in charge of the characters, but couldnt animate them, the work was put onto Ben who could’ve put effort into something else (luckily, he seemed to like the animation).

[icantplaythis-bct]

Game + Play statements

“Contextual Statement”:

Our game can be classified as a narrative-driven interactive drama. As the main focus of our game is dialogue and regret, I looked at other narrative-driven games and compared them to discover what makes them successful and how we can incorporate these design elements or do something different.

The main one I looked at was Telltale’s The Walking Dead Season 1. This game really stood out to me when I first played it because of the interesting characters and how your choices really matter in the story. Character are affected by your choices and can be killed off by simple choices. The player character has to survive in the world of The Walking Dead by making hard choices to kill certain people or save others, that affects the story later. The game features a end screen that shows the percentage of players who made the same choices as you. This shows the player how their choices were either in the majority or minority of players and the other choices they could have decided. Later games made by Telltale feature the same systems but toned down to give the impression that your choices matter, but will always have the same ending. This is a consequence of lazy writing is why Telltale Games haven’t been doing well as the end screen reveals that most of their choices had little effect. This is because its hard to make multiple endings between seasons as 2 ending in the first season will lead into 4 or 5 in the next game, and even more in the next.

Another game similar to ours is Until Dawn. This butterfly-effect stood out to me of how the smallest choices can have devastating consequences. This are great as it plays on the feeling on regret, causing people to make rash decision and regretting it for the rest of the game. This allows the games to feel large and encourage players to play again to see what would happen if they chose different options. The game jumps between characters as they progress through the story, affecting each other. Unlike Telltale games, the smallest choices can cause all the characters to die or all of them to live. An example of this is deciding to be mean to a character, only for them to stab you in the back or indirectly cause your character to die. This game has thousands of endings that are truly unique and encourage multiple playthroughs. The game starts of very humorous with friends joking around but it slowly turns into a horror of making harsh choices to save certain characters or killing everyone off.

Detroit: Become Human is another similar game that feature choice and consequence. You swap between different androids in a futuristic world where you serve different jobs. The main character Connor is a prototype android specializing in investigating cases involving deviant androids. As you progress through the game, the android you play as become more human depending on your actions. After you complete a level the game shows you a decision tree of all the possible actions you could have taken. This is really cool as it lights up only the choices that you took that level, encouraging replayability.

“Reflective Statement”:

Over the semester I have learnt a lot about project workflow and the importance of working successfully with others to complete a goal. We have worked on making this reality by assigning tasks based on our strengths and what we have done in the past. At the start I was assigned the programming workload with Max and I focused on making the dialogue system. Others in the group were assigned to art and design. Over the semester, we changed our tasks depending on what was needed at the time to help others with their workload so no one was doing nothing. For the first 3 weeks, we were unmotivated as we didn’t have a collective goal of what we wanted the game to be. We discussed and came up with a game around stopping a bomb that your character planted by trial and error. After speaking to Charles, Ricardo and Ben, we realised that the amount of work needed for this idea was beyond our current skill level and time limits, so the lecturers helped us simplify the game into its core aspects. At first our main idea was around the feeling of grief, but we changed it to the feeling of regret to be the focus of the game. Instead of defusing a bomb the player would go through train carriages, helping characters to get over their feelings of regret.

When talking to people from the Year 2’s and 3’s class, someone told me to check out a program called Yarn for dialogue. After further research, I found that Yarn was a dialogue programming language designed to be used by writers with limited Unity and programming experience. It was a easy to use program with well documented features for writing a dialogue flow chart. The code files could then be exported and put into Unity to be used by the game using the interpreter called YarnSpinner. By building our game using this system, we saved a huge amount of time and made it very easy for non-programmers in the group to contribute to writing. For the dialogue writing for the game, I created the personality traits and drafts for the mother and boy racer in google docs and yarn. Nate then took those drafts and expanded on them while I worked on the yarn implementation. Max worked on the hobo as it was the character he created. I want to work on this project again in the future as it has a lot of potential, stated by playtesters and members of the group. In the future I want to expand on the carriage system by adding more character to interact with, and a sound system that plays music and sounds depending on the carriage and the option you have chosen. The next big feature I want is a tracking system that records your options and compares them to a list of other people’s options, similar to telltale games to see the percentage of people who made the same choices as you.

[icantplaythis-bct]

#ctec503 - Final Entry - James Fletcher - “Carriages”

Index: 

https://icantplaythis-bct.tumblr.com/post/179548615941/final-assignment-week-6

https://icantplaythis-bct.tumblr.com/post/179548258256/final-assignment-week-5 

https://icantplaythis-bct.tumblr.com/post/179547994231/final-assignment-week-4

https://icantplaythis-bct.tumblr.com/post/179547431681/final-assignment-week-3

https://icantplaythis-bct.tumblr.com/post/179546960316/final-assignment-week-2

https://icantplaythis-bct.tumblr.com/post/178600434751/final-assignment-first-week

[icantplaythis-bct]

Final Assignment Week 6

This last week has been hectic for everyone. We have finished writing the dialogue, Charina has finished with the art, Ben has finished with the animations, Max and I are finished with the Unity scene. The first half of the week was spent finishing the dialogue systems and Unity scene. We had a few bugs at first including dialogue trees that weren’t working and unity scripts that were failing. Over the weekend most people in the group were done with their work so they stayed home or came in to write up their blogs and statements for the final hand-in. I got a computer to run the Unity game on and set it up with the TV in our area for the lecturers to be able to watch it while another one played.

While in class I got people to playtest our game. I mostly got positive feedback about how the dialogue made them think and the number of dialogue choices there were. Everyone was different on how they played the game. Some people helped the mother and racer get over their regret but failed on the hobo. Others failed on the mother and racer, but helped the hobo. After 4 or 5 tries the player would be able to successfully help every character to get over their regret. I personally think this makes our game successful as it can’t be completed in one try. Some people would continually fail on the same characters, and learn how to help them with the grief after 4 or 5 tries. This shows that the game is a learning experience and teaching players.

On Sunday we got a working version of the game. The character animations looked weird and we didn’t have time to fix them, so we set the sprite renderer to render them as black. This doesn’t break the aesthetic of the game as the full coloured sprites are seen on the end screen, but would be nice to fix between studio hand-in and the presentation. I found some spelling errors in the dialogue but it was too late to build the game again so we have to just submit as it is. I think we did a good job on the game and I hope to work on it again next year.

Stuff from the wall:

[icantplaythis-bct]

Final Assignment Week 5

This week was a mental break for me after going insane. While at home I worked on the character dialogues and fixing the Yarn implementation in Unity. There isn’t much to talk about as Ben continued making animations for the characters, Charina finished making the character sprites, Nate finished his models so helped me write the characters and Max continued developing unity scripts and started writing the hobo dialogue. I feel that I didn’t do much this week, but this is all in preparation for the final crunch next week. We have started to work on the final drafts of the dialogue for the characters, and finished what the carriage scene will look like. I messed with the camera settings in Unity and made the background look more 3D. We might not use this when we put the actual sprites in as it makes the ceiling and ground look very weird and different. I tried to fix it using a soft light to illuminate everything in the carriage, but still ended up looking weird. 

[icantplaythis-bct]

Final Assignment Week 4

This week has been spent researching different dialogue and how successful games use it. I have been researching games that i’ve played and stood out to me. I first looked at MMOs and RPG games that have a strong narrative. 

After this I looked at more narrative-driven games that were similar to the one we were making. This included Telltale Games, Detroit: Become Human, Until Dawn and Life is Strange. 

The main one I looked at was Telltale’s The Walking Dead Season 1. This game really stood out to me when I first played it because of the interesting characters and how your choices really matter in the story. Character are affected by your choices and can be killed off by simple choices. The player character has to survive in the world of The Walking Dead by making hard choices to kill certain people or save others, that affects the story later. The game features a end screen that shows the percentage of players who made the same choices as you. This shows the player how their choices were either in the majority or minority of players and the other choices they could have decided. Later games made by Telltale feature the same systems but toned down to give the impression that your choices matter, but will always have the same ending. This is a consequence of lazy writing is why Telltale Games haven’t been doing well as the end screen reveals that most of their choices had little effect. This is because its hard to make multiple endings between seasons as 2 ending in the first season will lead into 4 or 5 in the next game, and even more in the next.

Another game similar to ours is Until Dawn. This butterfly-effect stood out to me of how the smallest choices can have devastating consequences. This are great as it plays on the feeling on regret, causing people to make rash decision and regretting it for the rest of the game. This allows the games to feel large and encourage players to play again to see what would happen if they chose different options. The game jumps between characters as they progress through the story, affecting each other. Unlike Telltale games, the smallest choices can cause all the characters to die or all of them to live. An example of this is deciding to be mean to a character, only for them to stab you in the back or indirectly cause your character to die. This game has thousands of endings that are truly unique and encourage multiple playthroughs. The game starts of very humorous with friends joking around but it slowly turns into a horror of making harsh choices to save certain characters or killing everyone off.

Detroit: Become Human is another similar game that feature choice and consequence. You swap between different androids in a futuristic world where you serve different jobs. The main character Connor is a prototype android specializing in investigating cases involving deviant androids. As you progress through the game, the android you play as become more human depending on your actions. After you complete a level the game shows you a decision tree of all the possible actions you could have taken. This is really cool as it lights up only the choices that you took that level, encouraging replayability.

Max and I are still working on Unity scripts but I’ve been focusing on developing a dialogue system. When I was talking to a Year 2 who had came over to see what we were doing, he suggested to look at a program called Yarn. After further research I discovered that it would be perfect for our assignment and save a lot of time. Yarn is a program designed for writers who have limited Unity experience. It allows writers to develop dialogue trees and export them as code. By using these code files, I can put them into Unity and using the interpreter called YarnSpinner, make a working dialogue system. 

I have started writing the dialogue for each character. First I made character sheets with the personality and their regrets. I have started making drafts of each character and giving them to Nate and Max to expand on. 

We started to pull down our old work so this is for reference:

[icantplaythis-bct]

Final Assignment Week 3

For this week we developed on the idea of regret and ways we might show it in the game. Jordan was friends with a Youth Line phone councilor, so we spoke to him about how he talks to people about regret and how we might include dialogue to get people to open up. He was very helpful and gave us all a lot of good ideas on dialogue writing. While this was happening, Nate was working on the model of the carriages and using the old station model he made for the first idea for the main menu screen. I worked with Max to make Unity scripts and worked on the overall game design of what the game and lighting would be like. This included moving light sources around and bug fixing scripts when they wouldn’t work in the scene.

An important step this week was the character design. We had decided on having 3-5 characters in the carriages to talk to. Max had the idea of making a hobo character in the 3rd carriage that would be a nice relaxing talk. The first two will be a overworked mother who feels regret for not spending time with her children, and a boy racer who killed his best friend and feels regret for directly being the cause of their death. I want to do a 4th carriage of a insane man that you can’t help. This is to reinforce the idea that not everyone can be saved and you just have to move on. Other people in the group like this idea but to keep the game simple we are thinking of keeping it to the 3 main carriages, plus a 4th that is a reflection of you. When you enter the 4th you will find an identical character to give you the idea that you are doing good by helping the people move on with their regret. I don’t fully understand this idea but it will be a good ending for the game to explain what you have been doing. Ben has started making the animations for the game starting with the menu. He made a really nice menu scene with the station so it looks like trains are going past really fast. I think we are making fast progress and will finish the game if we keep up this workload.

[icantplaythis-bct]

Final Assignment Week 2

This week was spent getting sorted on the type of game we wanted to make. We got to interview some year 3′s, the lecturers and a graduate who really helped us see the problems with our current idea. The problem with our current idea was it was a game that would be made by a team of 50 professionals in a year, whereas we only had 13 weeks and a team of 6. The game would be far too complex for our group and had too many features. A lot of us were onboard with the idea but didn’t fully understand it. At the end of the interviews we nearly threw away all of our ideas but we kept the idea of the subway train and station. This is what gave us the idea of ‘Carriages:’ Instead of a timed game where you defuse a bomb that you planted, only for it to not be real, you travel through train carriages talking to people, helping them to get over their regret and move on. We changed our idea from grief to regret, and got a lot more organised so everyone in the group knew what the goal would be.