GO LIVE: Developing into a concept
Game inspired from a comment I received in my previous presentation: “consider what obsession does to your brain”
Games similar to this concept: Needy Streamer Overload, Emily is Away
Activity: As the player, you must make V3LVET do different activites in order to get as many followers as possible. More followers = more donations. More donations = more money and you won’t get kicked out.
Reward: You get different reactions out of V3LVET and different endings.
Opportunity: Offers the player a more chaotic form of gameplay. You have stats to constantly monitor, if certain stats exceed, it affects her.
For gameplay loops, I was worried about it being too similar to Needy Streamer Overload. So to differentiate the games, I thought about what if the player experiences some form of minigame during her streams. Once you choose an activity for V3LVET to do, you will be given a minigame to do. These minigames won’t be too difficult, however, depending on your performance, it will either take some weight off your shoulders, or burden you further (affects the stats).
Prototyping process:
For this prototype, as this game is more narrative based and a lot of text and speech involved, I decided to make it on Twine. This will offer me a lot of paths and direction.
Purpose of this prototype: Show how your actions affect the stats.
First thing I did was open Twine. The entire process of making this game wasn’t too difficult. The only real hard part about ti was making the background aesthetics.
I began to write a narrative, setting the scene of the world that V3LVET lives in.
The text in colour is the syntax. This is used so that the text in square brackets is affected by it.
StoryInit: This is for the stats, as it starts off at a 0, I need to make it clear. The tutorial that I looked at also mentioned to call it “StoryInit” or else this would not work
StatsHeader: This is for the actual stats that will be show above the text. As you can see, I wanted to show the different colours of the stats to differentiate. The line where it says (str-repeated: 10 $persona), is a line of code to let Twine know that the max input of a stat is 10. The lines of code where it says (set $persona to (max: 0 $persona) is to prevent the variables from going above a max value.
This is the first passage of the game where your choices affect the gameplay. The code at the top is applied to each passage, it’s to let Twine know that I want the header stats to show there. The code in the middle is linked to a script in Story > StyleSheet, this is just a simple aesthetic choice to make it look like a live chat.
Finally, at the bottom is the choices given to the player. Rather than me using double square brackets, I used a link to the next passage. I found that I had a lot of problems with the double square brackets and the stats didn’t change if I had used that method. In the narrative, I wanted to show that the more shy you are, the stats don’t really change that much. However, if you choose a path that means bringing forth this persona, it drastically changes the stats. This is good and bad though as it’ll be more unpredictable to keep track of your stats.
As we can see, the passages follow a fairly simple layout. You have three options to choose from and your story will be affected just for that current moment of time. However, your stats will be the one that is mostly affected.
Mid way through making the prototype, I wanted to show what would happen if you were to keep on pushing yourself, exceeding a certain threshold on parasocial pressure.
The second line of code at the top is to let Twine know that if parasocial pressure reaches or exceeds 8, you will be given a game over screen- V3LVET quits being a streamer and is yet again faced with eviction threats.
StoryStyle sheet: ! USED CHATGPT TO HELP ME WITH AESTHETICS !
Everything in the orange text shows what the code is for!
^ As mentioned before, this is the code that makes the chat look like a live chat!
^ This code is to give the game a vaporwave aesthetic, it gives the passage containing the text, a glowy, neon look. These are all just simple aesthetic choices that I wanted implemented in the game.
^ Finally, these lines of code is to show the live button. I wanted it o look like the actual live buttons with blinking lights.
Concept Art:
For the concept art, I wanted to make this persona quite “male gaze” leaning, pandering to men. I was really inspired by Playboy bunny suits and Japanese maid culture costumes. So I had combined both aspects together to get this outcome.
Aspects I wanted to include in the design:
- The hair accessory frills
- Bow and collar
- Latex bodice
- Short, poofy, frilly skirt
Thoughts and takeaways:
At the end of my presentation, one of my peers said that the game was too hard to read from the back of the classroom, which is a small fix in the aesthetics. I could either make the text bolder, or make the background colour less dark.
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