We started off the week by brainstorming ideas. We listed some topics that interested us. For example, how to raise the awareness of implicit bias? How to encourage marginalized people to take more positive actions towards bias? Also, we came up with some examples of implicit bias, microaggressions, and stereotypes. We noticed that although we have a wide range of topics, we mostly focused on Asian and international students as the marginalized group.
We also looked for inspiration from the game Florence, which is an interactive love story. The story is simple, but the interactivity of the game is eye-catching. For example, when the couple is arguing in the game, the player won’t be provided any dialogues about the arguments. Instead, the player is moving the puzzles to form a dialogue bubble. The art style is cute, which makes the player easily relate to the story.
Less dialogue is what we’re looking for. Therefore, here we had our first idea –
We also thought that most transformational games fall into this linear visual novel category, regardless of whether it relies on dialogues, interactions, or voiceover. We wanted to provide our client a more ambitious idea and hear feedback.
We gained inspiration from the 2 movies – Inception and Soul. We wonder whether we could let the player play the game in the victim’s subconsciousness and go through the victim’s memory. The game is more like an adventure instead of a story unfold.
The player can move around and interact with objects in a scene. The art style that fits the game is something like this
It also has an advantage compares to Idea 1. We won’t be needing too much effort from the artist if we choose this route. However, the downside is that the interaction puts challenges on non-gamers and it’s challenging for us to make emotional connections or achieve any transformational goals using this type of game.
We had great feedback from the client meeting. The client liked each idea and agreed that Idea 1 seems achievable but Idea 2 is more innovative. He’d like to see if we could come up with a combination that has each’s strengths. We thought that this direction definitely worthed trying! The instructors also reminded us that we didn’t have any defined transformational games despite that we had some examples of the story. Hence, the goals of the rest of the week are having more defined transformational goals and coming up with a game design/framework that combines Idea 1 and Idea 2.
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