SarahCreating a Game Prototype
What attracts you to your favourite games? Personally, I’m drawn to games driven by narrative and player choices. For example, Disco Elysium excels at weaving agency into how your character develops and interacts with the world.
I am an undergraduate alum of UWaterloo and (fingers crossed) nearly a graduate alum as well. One of my final English grad courses focused on Game Studies. In addition to more theory-based and discussion-based assessments, we each shared an open-ended creative project. Like many others, I decided to prototype a game.
Inspired by the creative “choices matter” games I’d experienced, I wanted to try my hand at a basic RPG game with diverging dialogue. If you’re interested in playing, feel free to visit optimistinmotion.com/Epic-Game/index.html before reading spoilers below.
Game Overview
To set the stage, the player is asked two questions. What genre of game would you prefer – “cute” or “horror”? Do you want to interact with others as an “optimist” or a “cynic”? Once you have a setting and social orientation (as I liked to call it), your personal door is revealed. These questions guide where you go and how you interact with others, including your dialogue options. I realize both pairs are oversimplified, but I wanted to give the impression of a real choice. Want to wear a sparkling smile into a zombie apocalypse? Would you rather roll your eyes at the local gardeners? The player decides.
I won’t completely spoil the plot, but players can choose how to treat the people and animals they meet, and these choices affect their possible endings. In addition, they eventually find (and must cooperate with) their own alter ego who made different initial choices. There is no “right answer” in sight, save for cooperation as a moral good.
Thought Process
Where does academia fit into this? Looking at our texts, I found myself most influenced by Flanigan and Nissenbaum’s Values at Play and their discussion of how different game elements work together to influence games’ values (33). The course also explored empathy in games, including Isbister’s How Games Move Us.
Several challenges arose during development. On a technical level, I had to learn how to make tiles passable or impassable if I didn’t want players to walk through walls, and there was a software learning curve. I chose RPG Maker MV for its relative ease, since this isn’t a commercial game, but it was still a new tool. Diverging dialogue can be time-consuming. Finally, after tester feedback, I also needed time to make objects more interactive.
The themes gave me pause as well. For one, I debated how much “free choice” to truly give. Should I force the player to explore the town, or just remind them not to miss it? How far can I poke at genre tropes before it feels tacky? How much can I reward pacifist modes of play before making it hit-you-over-the-head obvious, and does this undermine player agency?
There is no major take-away here. I created a thing, enjoyed the process, and hope it brings players joy. However, this semester gave me a reason to critically analyze games, which I hadn’t done before. Approaching from the creator side helped me to value games even more. If you’re on the fence about creating something new, I’d say “go for it”. If you have the time and interest, why not?
Original presentation PDF (including credits): https://bit.ly/34trqai.
Article first published in WAT is Zine? Alumni Mini Issue 1: August 2020