This week, we again used different words to think of game ideas, except this time we first chose one of three themes and then used five randomly drawn different game elements to engage in divergent thinking. During the process, we teamed up with different people to think, simulating the collision of different ways of thinking and communication under different circumstances. Overall, collaborating and thinking with others was a lot of fun. Although there might have been friction and arguments over ideas along the way, by the time the session ended and we had to switch groups, our ideas always ended up unified.
For this one, we were divided into different groups to explore one of the three given games (our group was assigned Florence) and tried to sense what the author wanted to convey to the readers.
From some promotional gameplay clips, I pieced together the story: it’s about a girl who goes from living an aimless life to encountering love, and through the blending and friction of emotions, rediscovers what she truly loves. I think what the author wanted to express is exactly the idea of loving your own life. All the negative emotions in it are gray and dim, but when she comes into contact with the things she likes, they become bright again.
My Work — part of work
View this work in About my game
After finalizing the story outline, I tried to draw the first-person perspective of the protagonist lying on a hospital bed at the beginning as the background. Because I wanted to achieve an effect where you can look up, down, left, and right (similar to a VR effect), the image I drew is relatively long.
At this point, my first NPC was almost finished being designed. I gave her three different facial expressions and two different hand gestures, and the glasses can also be chosen to be worn or not.
I also used two other classmates as references to design drafts for two other different NPCs. One of them strongly insisted that her character have a dog about the same height as her, so I added that in as well.
After deciding on the game I wanted to make, I quickly sketched a diagram to work out the core game mechanics. However, I had not finalised the font at that point. A day later, I settled on a font built mainly from squares and circles.
This is the vocabulary I’ve come up with so far.
In the initial outline (see My Work from Week 1), I wrote that three characters appear in this story, so I decided to start with the NPCs that advance the plot. To keep the characters mysterious and emphasize the unknown nature of the symbols I designed (so that players cannot guess the word from the characters’ expressions), I plan to design them as silhouettes. (See the sketches below.)
After drawing several supporting characters, I began experimenting with the layout for the main menu. (See drafts below.)
What I need to do next:
Attempt to write actual code to combine all my existing work and test the outcome.