Exercise 6.8

between the dark and the light

(working game title)

Market - PG-13, adolescents to young adults. Perhaps there are some situations with profane language and/or adult themes.

Market Appeal - Everyone loves a good sim game, but our game is directed toward a teenage crowd. Players will be presented with scenarios and challenges they can identify with. The topic and challenges will directly connect to ONE critical issue this age of students have to face to.

Players - One player.

Objectives - Collect points from making decisions that lead to good deeds, neutral deeds, or bad deeds. Player will encounter NPCs, objects (if we want an inventory, the character can collect these. If not the objects serve a purpose of revealing backstory of character or hints on how to win).

Procedures - In the game, the player controls the character to make choices when encountering other NPCs (Non-player characters) or events. The player may or may not collect points based on the consequences of the choice he/she had made. The points collected from each decision can be either positive or negative. Players can collect both points. However, only the one with larger points will decide the ending. If neither good nor evil points are accumulated to a certain amount, the game will end differently. The player must choose between available options when presented with a decision to make.

Rules - The character cannot choose to perform bad deeds more than 2x in a row. 3 bad deeds in a row will end the game, and the player will lose. The character cannot choose to perform a single bad deed against a vulnerable NPC or object in the game.

Resources - A collection of good deeds and bad deeds, which results in a point total. We are not sure if we are creating an inventory for the player to collect items that would be used as entry to certain areas or act as information/clues for solving puzzles to learn more about the character, story, and advance gameplay.

Conflicts - The dilemma of choice is the major conflict of this game. Choose between good and evil. The player must realize the goal of the game is to play against the devil by choosing to do good instead of bending to his will by performing bad deeds.

Boundaries - There will be a start and an ending to identify where the game starts and ends. In the text-based game the world is not open, so our storytelling decisions that impact the overall narrative structure of the game will create boundaries.

Outcome - Making correct decisions will lead to a good ending, and most of the time, the good deed decision is the best but not always depending on the NPC and event. Choosing too many bad deeds will end the game quickly. However, the endings are unknown to players. We encourage players to try different combinations of choices to explore the story.

Challenge - Some decisions the player must make are difficult, and they must be able to tolerate ambiguity and figure out what the best move is based on the narrative, the specific scenario, NPC, and character's backstory. There are NPCs that can lead the player astray from the objective of the game which is to do good deeds.

Play - The player will meet the character and is in control of the character’s path and decision making. There will be NPCs and events that prompt the player with decisions to make that will cause the character to perform good or bad deeds. Good deeds don’t necessarily win the player points, as some decision events good deed decision isn’t necessarily the right one. There are also some situations that are so ambiguous that it’s hard to say if there’s a good or bad way to navigate them, so they could pose a learning curve for the player. If we can randomize events, this would be a good way to implement those. These will be small, seemingly unimportant decisions. Holding a door open for an elderly person. Smiling when another person looks at you as you pass by them on the street instead of looking away. Perhaps every time our player chooses good in these ambiguous situations, the devil doubles down to persuade/manipulate our player into choosing the wrong path. The deeper our player gets onto this path, the longer the game goes, but perhaps more clues, events and NPCs spawn.

Premise - Faced with a choice between good and evil, which would you decide?

Character - It's a third-person vision game. The main character can be a teenaged boy/girl, who has problem behaviour, e.g. bullying others, or an invisible kid in high school, who has really low self-esteem. However, deep down into his/her heart, the character is a good person who is empathetic and kind. She/he doesn’t want to be bad, so our player has to figure that out find the win condition.

Story - (subject to change) One day, he/she died - not a gruesome awful death but died peacefully in his/her sleep from an undiagnosed condition. Because of this, the character has some unresolved issues in the world. It is not completely obvious that the character is dead, until the player encounters the devil NPC. The devil says to him/her, if he/she could win a certain points from him in the next three days, he/she could let him revive, otherwise, his/her soul will be taken.

In the following days, the character will see a lot of things happen after his/her death, and from a different perspective, since he/she is a spirit now. Every time a player makes a choice that affects the real world, his/her choice will either collect or lose points from the devil.

At the end of game, the body of the character is threatened by a fire, and our character realizes that he/she is still being loved, because his/her parents, or lover, or friends come and try to save his body (let them know that there is a chance to get back to this world is also a mission for our character as well). The saver will be trapped in the fire and is going to die. The last choice is whether the character will use his points to trade with the devil and let him save the saver and take his soul, or vice versa. On the other hand, if the character collects enough points from the player, there will be a good ending.

World Building - Since we are using a text-based format, we will use dramatic colours, backgrounds, sounds and music to build the world. There’s a theme of light and dark, and sometimes grey, when our character is presented with a choice. The colour of the background can change as a progress indicator of sorts or even mood change of the character in the game, so the player has a sense of how their decisions are affecting the character.