Emotion Game (Design Exercise)
Emotion Game (Design Exercise)
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Awkward communication
Awkward communication
Emotion game is a project developed in 2 weeks with a team of 4 people. The goal of emotion game was to illicit the explicit feeling of awkwardness from the player, without using any words. The implied existence of words without explicit definition was used to make players feel on edge and unsure of their understanding.
Kate's responsibilities for this project included:
Designing Paper Prototype
Programming movement and progression
Programming NPC response table
Paper Prototype
The design of the game being the most important part, the team spent a lot of time and energy on the paper prototype before writing a single line of code, even with the short turn around. Kate designed a paper prototype where an operator, acting as the computer and given a response script to memorize, placed down drawings of the game's symbols at a fixed pace and in response to the player also putting down symbols. This test proved very effective in finding the current systems strengths (a stress about not understanding what's going on, bolstered by curve balls like compound symbols). And the systems weaknesses (Respondents often flailed and responded wildly when confused).
Programming
When Kate was programming this game, she prioritized a quick turn around. This led to her automating the animation, to take stress off the artist and most of the code being based around JSON integration. By building the characters around a custom JSON file, she was able to create an easy readable way for the artist and game designer to implement their choices, that also proved highly flexible for changes. This also allowed Kate to spend less of her focus on asset implementation, and more on coding the intricate but obtuse dialogue system to be highly adjustable.
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