I spent my first week back in the studio concepting a number of responses to the design recommendations of my thesis:
Brickbreaker Dialogue Game
Focusing on stretch and spatial opposition, this opens up the traditional dialogue ‘choices’ of relationship games / visual novels like Love Island or Doki Doki Literature Club to new mechanics. Conversations are resolved a bit like a game of Brick Breaker, with individual words being ‘fired’ at the player’s side of the screen, propelled by varying amounts of energy (and in different directions?). The player has a Tetris-like ‘queue’ of words that make up their dialogue response, and how much of this queue they use up in accepting/deflecting/rejecting the NPC’s ‘bricks.’ A ‘stamina’ system is also tied to the amount of words used, and impacts the amount of words and stamina available to the player in the next round. Depending on the ratio of accepted/deflected/rejected words, the NPC’s next dialogue option changes… The interface is superimposed, ludic and emphatic.
Editing Correspondence Game
Focusing on both stretch and summary, as well as on-screen and off-screen narrative, this game casts the player as some sort of editor / correspondent, receiving and editing the manuscript pages / poetry of a writer. A non-interactive letter is shown to them, then the newest ‘draft’ becomes available to edit – by selecting different cursors (strikethrough, highlight, notate – maybe unlocking different phrases through eg. doing lots of strikethroughs in one edit) the player can make suggestions which the game will respond to procedurally, with a new letter reflecting on those changes (how to calculate attitude?) and a new draft implementing some (almost certainly not all!) of those changes. The interface is integrated, fictional and ecological.
Chekhov Dwarf Fortress Game
This game focuses on summary, mobility of characters, and emergent paths and axes. Agents with different wants / needs / knowns / attitudes / lenses / states interact emergently (Dwarf Fortress-style) on a stage set – the setting and characters are drawn from eg. Chekhov’s The Seagull, and each (timed) act is broadly set up following that play’s structure. A UI ‘box’ outputs the ‘summary’ of agent actions and conversations (X talked to Y about Z; it made her happy), maybe collecting everything into one ‘prompt script’ at the end of the act. Interaction is extremely minimal, maybe even non-existent; only the decision to ‘commit’ to a particular runthrough and advance to the next act is made. The interface is superimposed, fictional (if it is indeed a prompt script/rehearsal notes) and emphatic.
Choosing a Project
I presented these three projects to David and Maddalena, and after talking through the scope and challenges of each one, decided on pursuing the third. This was due to a number of factors: my familiarity with the theatrical process; the procedurality of the project (something I had already examined in my Experimental Development project); the low visual demand of the project, and the high level of challenge it provided.
Upon considering the timescale of the project, I decided to reduce the scope of this artefact to the first act of The Seagull – I would lose the committing mechanic, but I felt that digging further into agent behaviour and emergent narrative generally would be worth the work. By designing dialogue for turn-based ‘summary’ time I also hoped to provoke the reflective, ‘actor’-like headspace in players that I have identified in my Critical Play project and Understanding the Game Experience paper.