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Game Controls

Use the mouse to move

Click to use items

Artist Statement

This game was inspired by RPG games from the early 2000s. Another major source of inspiration was White Chess by Yoko Ono. Once again taking the concept of who is considered heroes and villains and exploring how approaching these concepts from a different point of view will affect gameplay, the player’s experience, and the overall end goal of the game.

The player is spawned in Zelda Village and presented with the challenge of finding all the runes to save their family. During this journey, the player will run into several characters who are not described as friends or foes. It is completely up to the player’s discretion who they determine to be viable or allies or enemies. Although there is a set goal, which is to find all the Runes. This goal can be achieved through multiple routes and it is all up to the player. This relates to how relationships in real life work, and making certain characters in the game allies will affect your chances of developing bonds with others. In the end who you associate has its consequences. For example allying with a certain character can cause another character to be hostile towards you. In this sense not only is the player faced with how each character presents themselves when making a decision but also how this decision will also affect their relationship with other characters. In such a situation the player can either choose to stick with their judgement of the character solely based on their actions and what they said, or be swayed by the opinions of others about the character. This is similar to the way these situations pan out in the real world.

Although this is the current state of the game, I would hope to be able to expand it from a simple RPG to an MMORPG. Which would then have players interacting with not only NPCs but other players as well. This would still maintain the element of choosing which people to ally with or battle. To expand on this concept, there can even be “beef” between guilds, which would then mean that simply joining a guild could either create a whole set of new allies or enemies, and even in this situation players can decide whether or not they want to  align themselves with their guild in terms of the people that they associate themselves with or not.

Score:

1. Draw circles (which start and end at the same point) on a paper
2. Don’t touch the lines
3. Start imaging a world with shapes and add icons (modifiable)

Artistic Statement:

The idea was inspired by the process to create game art in Pearce’s “Game as Art”, which was to make the viewers enroll in the game. However, I think about it reversely: what if a player becomes an art viewer? Paper and pen are common tools used by the player to document the process of the game. The recorded information represents the whole adventure of a player. I recalled the memory with my friends when I saw the notes of the game. From then on, I realized that I viewed the notes from a player to a viewer aspect.

I usually search about how programmers achieve the visual effect with only code and basic assets. The logic sometimes is really simple, but nobody has this idea before. It is fun to see how the code runs violently, but everything looks fine on the screen. A map in a game is important but sophisticated to generate. Different developers use many kinds of methods. However, an interesting fact is that most video games with a generated world would like to generate the landscape first, then other content. The whole process is run by the computer with the rules, but I think it can be interesting if I figure out a way to generate a map physically.

In programming logic, everything related to graphs is about points and lines. So, a map is the result of patterned points and lines that seem like a “map” defined by people. Then, the problem is obvious, what kind of patterns make people think the graph is a map? From my research, contour lines are widely used in professional maps. Then, I find the common traits that all lines are circles and they don’t touch each other. With the lines, it is easy to imagine the world and stories. Finally, adding icons on the map for hints. This part can be modified with other rules.

The playtested result shows more than I expected. Different numbers of players can affect the process of the stories (players make their own storylines, and sometimes interact with others). I modified the third part of the score with guidance to help players imagine the contents of the world. The more players to playtest, the less guidance they need.

1 player / lots of guidance

2 players / no guidance

3 players / little guidance

Initial Ideas

For my project, I had decided that I wanted to something within a game whose community I considered myself a part of. Unfortunately, I don’t play a ton of online multiplayer games, which limited my options to pretty much just Hearthstone. The other problem with this decision was that Hearthstone does not have a built in chat feature to communicate with your random opponents, you can only chat in-game with people on your friends list. There is a feature that allows you to send a friend request to your most recent opponent, but most people who use that do it to trash talk or harass their opponent after a frustrating game. Thinking about that possible roadblock gave me the idea of creating a scenario with that expected/implied interaction, and flipping it on its head to see what would happen. From there, the Post-Game Interview was born.

The Process

The idea was to add my opponent after a game and, if they accepted, I’d ask a small series of questions about our game: “how long have you been playing today?”, “how much did you enjoy our game?”, and “did you feel we ere evenly matched?”. I wanted to be able to discuss our game in a calm, civilized manner, completely counter to what usually happens in this situation. I felt that this premise was simple enough to be able to do many times, but still be able to create a meaningful interaction. It’s a good thing it was so easy to repeat, because, unsurprisingly, not many of my opponents were willing to participate. Of the 20 or so games I played during this stretch, only 5 of my opponents actually accepted my friend request so that I could actually conduct an interview. The low participation was an interesting, albeit expected, point of data, but I was luckily still able to find out some pretty interesting things from the other data I collected.

Results

Firstly, I was only added back by opponents who had beaten me. This was a bit surprising, as I would’ve guessed that most players would expect a losing opponent to send a friend request with hostile intentions, but these 5 seemed to either not expect that to be my intention, or just not care. Another interesting thing I noticed about these opponents had to do with the in-game emotes. I, and many others who play Hearthstone, usually like to give a friendly Greetings to our opponent at the start of a game, but not all players do this. However, all 5 of my interviewees had returned my Greetings which I found interesting. Finally, from the interview questions themselves, most of these players had only been playing 1 or 2 games so far in this session, and they all ranked pretty highly in their enjoyment of our game and felt we were at least somewhat evenly matched. Overall, I would call this Intervention a success. It was fairly difficult to get participants due to the nature of my idea, but I feel that the people who did participate were given a nice experience in a usually hostile situation, which was really my whole goal. On top of all that, I was also able to collect some interesting data about a game I really enjoy, which was a nice added bonus.

One of my interviews

“

Imagine a creation, it does not have to be much, but it must be yours…

Now set to work

Build the spawn of your imagination piece by piece

Little by little witness the result of your focus come to life

Finish

Bask in the work’s glory

Realize that it is temporary

And destroy it

When finished, destroy this Score…”

This idea is stemmed from mainly 2 things. I wanted a score that was in itself, enjoyable to complete. It’s an experimental game design class after all, and games are meant to be fun. I wanted the first 5 steps of the score to make the participant connect to their creation. The final part of the score, is inspired by the Matchbook score meant to destroy art. Just burning any old art is one thing, but destroying your own art is a whole different thing. Now, the score here took the form of a goofy Picture + Video, but that’s just because that was the limit of my skillset. I’d find it more interesting if a person was to spend an even longer time on a piece, maybe music, maybe animation. I would love to see someone fall in love with their work, and then brush it aside like it was nothing. Almost like the sand mandalas that Buddhist monks make:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBrYUlOYK0U&ab_channel=WellcomeCollection