In Monday’s class, we continued brainstorming about the game. What is the main appeal of this game? Is it its artistic aesthetics, its rule-based progression, its narrative-driven nature, or its focus on the technical aspects of the game for a tech-savvy player experience? Based on my ideas from the first week, I highlighted the aesthetics aspect on a sticky note. I envision my game primarily involving players exploring the map and searching for interactive items. The aesthetic design will be centered around the game’s background story.
Next is the expression of emotions in the game, and what kind of feelings I want to convey to the players. My story is about a bygone era that can never be returned to. I am a very nostalgic person, and the time I most want to experience is not the present. I want to go back to the past, and I miss the past very much. So I hope that people who play this game can empathize with me, encounter certain old items that have been eliminated by the times, or feel fear, helplessness, and other emotions in familiar yet strange scenes.
I’m always thinking about what time is. I hate the passage of time, I want to stop or go back to a certain moment, I hate growing up, and I’m afraid of the uncertain future. So I miss the past so much—past times, past scenes, past experiences, my old puppy, even the sunshine of the past. Sometimes when I come into contact with certain objects that evoke memories, or return to a scene that hasn’t changed, it’s as if the suns of two different times overlap, and I can feel the same warm sunshine again. Sometimes I think: living in the present is actually living in the emotions of that moment. Whenever you look back on the past, whether you were happy, peaceful, regretful, or whatever, I’m reminiscing about the past, but that moment is what you’re experiencing now. This is a kind of overlapping of multiple times; different versions of myself exist simultaneously.
On Thursday, I created a PowerPoint presentation about my Game Design Pillars project, along with a brief three-minute report. In this presentation, I included some references about games and artists. Continuing from my Monday ideas, I found some electronic devices that are no longer commonly used but were frequently encountered by today’s youth, to evoke memories.
