shoplite

Shop for clothes online and realize the consequences

Click here to play!

(https://kayleighforeign.itch.io/shoplite)

This was the second project I worked on at HKU's Minor Interactive Narrative Design. This one was a group project, where I worked together with a fashion design, a data student, and an animator. The exercise for us was that our project needed to have something to do with addiction, and it became clear pretty quickly that the game we wanted to work on was going to be related to the overconsumption of fast fashion. It also became just as clear that I'd be the only one actually working in Unity again, though this time mostly because of technical difficulties. For a little while we wanted to make a fast-paced bullet hell where the bullets are shopping deals that you have to avoid buying, but in the end we went with something a little more backhanded, where we start by making the player take part in fast fashion, and then show them the consequences of their actions through cutscenes and text.

Scrolling Item List

We wanted to make buying as easy as possible, so in order to buy something, all the player needs to do is hover over an item for a short while, and it's bought; there's no budget or anything like that, since the financial side wasn't our focus. I stole the scrolling code from Sara Tone Inc. and then made that transition in and out of sliding on a timer to let the items go by more smoothly.

Player Incentives

Rather than making the player aimlessly buy things, I implemented some popup windows that showed off deals with a silhouette for a specific type of item, and whenever one of those items was bought, it'd fill up a bar underneath that window, and when that bar was full, the popup would disappear, giving a sense of completion, even though mechanically it doesn't impact the outcome at all - which the player, of course, doesn't know.

Closet Sorting

After a short while of collecting products, you get taken to your own room, and there you can sort the clothes you bought, by either putting them in your closet, or throwing them out. The closet has a limit of 30 items in there, which isn't fully realistic, but still at least forces people who buy a lot to throw things out, to get to the point of the game faster. There's a few items that start off in the closet by default, and those are intentionally not very interesting, and this gives the player the option to customize their closet and express themselves a bit.

Sending the Message

At the end of the game the player gets a big cutscene revealing the horrible nature of the fast fashion industry, as well as the receipt, showing their contributions to the landfill, i.e. the clothes they chose to throw out. In hindsight I would've liked to add a way to see the clothes you have in the closet at the end as well, just for a bit of personality, but since that's not really part of the game's main message, it's not that important to include.

While I feel like the execution of this project was pretty clean, and we didn't realistically have much time to expand on the project to make it more involved, I can't help but feel like the game is missing some agency, specifically for people that don't already take part in fast fashion. There was one specific person who tried simply not buying anything, which would break the game in some ways, so I set a minimum of 1, which I could've given at least some narrative purpose in hindsight. Some other playtesters did say they were affected by the game though, and that they would watch their shopping habits more closely as a result, which was our goal, so I'm at least happy we achieved that.

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