The inspiration behind the idea for this game was to somehow explore rotoscopic animations in a game.I have never played a game with rotoscopic animation and I wanted to discover the difference in experience in terms of graphics. After watching movies such as "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly", I always got the impression that this sort of visual effect was used to illustrate isolation, surrealism and out-of-mind experiences. I tried to come up with an idea with which I could exploit this visual style to be part of the game.
I eventually ended up with the idea of a single character suffering from insomnia that goes about his day in his house unperturbed by the realities of life outside his apartment. This situation seemed like an ideal scenario where a characters outlook on life could be effectively expressed with a specific visual style. I also thought it would be interesting to control the environment around the character instead of the character itself. This was mainly because I wanted to explore the cognitive effects of a person playing this game who also might have had similar experiences. I thought It would be interesting to see how players would use the environment to affect the character in way that would be parallel to them wishing the same in reality if they were in a similar situation. I wanted to explore the possibilities of inducing gratification while giving them control of the world, and if this would actually help them with their insomnia in reality after experiencing the game or help them understand the problem better (for those who don't suffer from insomnia).
Assessing our individual skill sets and assigning a role was not difficult because each of us already came in to the team with specific skills that were different from the others. I was assigned as the project manager which is a role I am very comfortable with. I was hoping to also work on some coding and graphics so I could learn some new skills.
We decided to set the ground rules for the visual style and environment first and then mold our game mechanics to fit in. Lazarro stresses on the significance of emotion in a game in his paper on "Why we play games". I thought the game mechanic should be seamless enough so the experience of the visual style was primary and the player could enjoy the experience of the game without too much hassle from the game mechanics and controls. A point and click style seemed like a good choice with which it would also be easy to access the objects used to manipulate the environment of the character.
We created the graphics by deciding on a location for the environment, photographing it and using filters in photoshop to create the rotoscoped effect. I was hoping for the graphics to resemble the illustrated effects in the movies that I mentioned but this proved difficult to achieve and the end result seemed contrived.
The coding process for the game was a bit of an issue because we didn't possess a familiarity with Flash. From noticing Nic's and David's experience with it, it seems really tricky to adapt to Action Script even while being proficient in other languages. It was consistently frustrating to discover a lot of easy techniques to achieve the software structuring and it required a completely different work around.
I could draw from a lot of the readings while thinking about the experience of the game but I had to use other resources for the actual creation of the game. I spent a lot of hours on tutorials just to be familiar enough to attempt a simple aspect of design or code so I could contribute to the game in other ways than Project Management. It seems obvious now that I could have contributed much more to the game if i was more proficient in the software we used to create our game.
The most interesting part of making this game was having team discussions on game mechanics and design. It was great to see the different cultural experiences among the team members while they gave suggestions on how the character would respond to certain situations. This particular aspect of our game creation process was very intriguing because we had to settle on certain design aspects that we wouldn't have normally used if we were working alone.
My outlook on the process has changed from learning about board games (which I was not familiar with) and DeKoven's concepts of play. It was very refreshing to read about such varied outlooks on game creation and spaces.
I always had a great appreciation for the game creation process but after being part of one and managing the project, admittedly on a much lesser scale, my appreciation for people constantly putting out games and taking the effort to polish them to perfection and not compromising on player experience has greatly increased.
Comments