Rock Paper Feelings!
Last week, I went to Tallinn to participate in a 48 hour game jam. The whole trip was arranged by Game Camps, an incentive to get peeps across the Nordic countries to cooperate more by encouraging them to make games together!
I didn’t know anyone going into it, so it was a pretty intense week of game building with initially strangers. It was super exhausting for sure, but I am super glad I went. My team had a total of five members - two programmers, me, one marketer and one audio designer. I took the role of artist and game designer - however we took care to carefully discuss and test the initial design together so I was certainly not the only one designing in the group :)
Anyway! We ended up winning, whaaat!
From the left; Jazeps Rutkis, Mika Simula, Sebastian Larsson (that’s me!), Jean-Philippe Dumont. Kristaps Auzins, one of our programmers, is sadly missing from this picture!
People have been asking what this magical game was about exactly, so I figured I’d do a quick overview and share some details about the process!
WHAT IS ROCK PAPER FEELINGS?
In short, Rock Paper Feelings is about integrating strategy and drama into one experience, allowing both to influence one another.
You play as the leader of a bunch of individuals set to ~save the world~. Here is the catch - you are all birds, and birds are very driven by their emotions- meaning a bird’s abilities is a result of their current emotional state. You, as their leader, must manipulate your fellow bird friends into the right emotions for current and future battles in order to combat increasingly emotionally dramatic enemies.
Screenshot from the finished prototype
ORIGINAL INSPIRATION
My original inspiration for this comes from Persona 4, which is a combination of a JRPG a dating simulator. Here players must deepen their NPC relationships in order to create creatures of higher and higher power. As I became more proficient in optimizing my relationships, I noticed that my actions were driven by what I thought would make my digital friends like me the most - rather than what I personally felt. This shift from genuine interest to straight up manipulation was not addressed by the game - but as a player I felt like a sociopath, optimizing for most value rather than my own feelings!
Main character Yu in Persona 4. Hero or manipulative butt?
Original pitch
I was inspired to explore this theme further, and thus the idea of a leader manipulating their party to enter a certain emotional state emerged. I quickly realized this could be quite destructive if not handled properly - as a result I decided to make everyone anything but humans to distantiate it from real manipulation, and to keep the tone quite light. The initial pitch was simply that of a leader manipulating their team of birds to feel certain ways in order to succeed long term. A combination of strategy and drama.
Wait, how do we do that?
After assembling a team based on interested people (which were from Latvia, Canada, Finland and Sweden!) we started defining just how one could integrate social manipulation and combat. In terms of feelings, we did not know what feelings would be included, how they would affect combat, or how one manipulated them. Due to our time limit, we decided to keep it simple and make combat grid-based and played out in a single round - no enemy AI or multiple step battles. As a further attempt to simplify, we decided to implement a simple rock paper scissors system with feelings - where one feeling always beats the next one in a circle.
Integrating feels into combat
The next question was how to even affect feelings. Originally, we theorized that the player could manipulate feelings in the journeys between battles - allowing the positioning of the team members to affect their emotional state. However, we quickly realized that if we could implement the feeling manipulation directly into combat - we could convey our entire intention within one core gameplay loop! This was great, because the strategy and drama would be intertwined.
Thus, feelings were designed to be changeable through combat. We came up with two parameters players could manipulate.
Lonely <-> Friendly
Brave <-> Scared
The player can change their bird’s friendliness to loneliness parameter by placing them close or far away from other birds. Bravery is affected by a bird’s individual battle results - meaning a bird which continually loses a battle will become scared while a winning bird becomes braver.
Paper prototyping!
After defining these rough overarching mechanics, we created what would become the foundation for our next two days - a paper prototype! Since the game was turn based, it was quite easy to test our ideas on paper. We spent at least six hours just discussing our core design and iterating on it it using this paper prototype.
Except for confirming our envisioned implementation was indeed quite interesting (on paper!), we also found that the player was given two goals;
1. To win the current battle.
2. To change the feelings of their birds to fit future fights
These two goals does not always work with each other - for example one may need a scared and lonely bird for a future battle - forcing the player to make at least one bird always lose! We have a short term goal of winning the current battle, and a long term goal of manipulating the birds to fit future demands. Thus a tricky trade-off is created where the player is constantly balancing short and long-term goals.
Makin’ it
After we had established a tested core design with our paper prototype, it was pretty easy to implement this design in a digital prototype. The rest of the work was largely about implementing and communicating the mechanics of the paper prototype in a cohesive way and drawing a ton of birds. Smooth sailing in terms of design work!
As the lone artist, I got to draw almost everything! Lots of fun! C:
Final result
According to testers, the prototype succeeded in combining strategy and drama, at least to some regard! Players seem to experience the conflict between short term and long term goals, and there is at least a vague sense of drama created from changing the emotional state of characters - depending on the person playing it. I am very pleased and surprised that we were able to realize our goals in only 48 hours.
We still have some polishing and talking to do before releasing our baby bird to the world, but if you are interested in testing the prototype, feel free to DM me and I’ll send you an .exe ! :)