Game Development Process

The development of this game began with deciding on what our theme is. Basing it on the fact that this is a point-and-click interface game, we decided that a mystery theme would suffice. The idea emphasized visuals such as the player’s surroundings, what type of environment are we in, and what the atmosphere is like. We thought it would be a great idea to place players in a setting where their environment is drastically changing so that the challenge is basically adapting to a new setup. A new setup meant different enemies, new locations, or maybe no enemies at all and the point is to solve a puzzle or find clues. That way, players constantly have new gameplay mechanics to explore and discover, instead of experiencing the same kind of gameplay in different environments. 

We decided that this game should focus on a kid exploring different settings that represent their emotions: anger, anxiety, sadness, and joy. The inspiration is heavily influenced by the Pixar movie, Inside Out, and the design aspect is influenced by the game, Persona 5, made by Atlus. Each emotion is color-coded where “anger” is red, “anxiety” is purple, “sadness” is blue, and “joy” is yellow. Each of us split up the work where we all designed individual scenes to convey each emotion. Masuma designed a Joy scene to represent happiness. Dominique designed the Anxiety scene. Juliana designed a scene to represent sadness and Patrick designed a scene that represents anger. Our original plan was to have each level take place within a home setting. After further discussion, we realized that every emotion did not have to take place in a house and that it would be easier if we could expand the scope to encompass any type of environment.

Patrick’s scene represents anger by traversing through a town with enemies continuously spawning on the streets. The kid is angry and feels that it’s extremely unfair that her parents decided to move to a new town. Patrick implemented lighting to give the town a red hue which reflects the kid's negative thoughts. The player must survive the onslaught of enemies to resist the negative thoughts and find the key to move on to the next level. He implemented a timer to countdown how long the player has to survive, as well as an automatic enemy spawner. Patrick also created our start menu and end screens, as well as the instructions. 

Dominique’s scene represents anxiety by placing the player in a public shopping center. The kid is afraid of adapting to a new neighborhood with new friends, she’s nervous and scared that she’ll have to introduce herself to a new group of people. Wherever she goes, it’s a new environment with different people that she’s unfamiliar with, unlike her old town. The player must avoid security guard drones patrolling the mall. If you get caught in their line of sight, which is their searchlight, you will die. Shoot all enemies down without getting caught to access the level gate to the next scene. Dominique was able to implement a “hiding” technique through ray casting, as well as an AI that pathed the bot's movement through the level. 

Juliana’s scene represents sadness with a blue house containing a bedroom, bathroom, and living room. The point of this scene was to give nostalgia. The kid recalls old, fond memories of her old house and feels sad that she doesn’t get the opportunity to replicate those same memories in the new house. Juliana designed notes, clues, and items that the player has to search for around the house and read. The player goes through a scavenger hunt for these old items in her apartment in order for her to recall memories from her old home. Once these items have been found, the player can then access a level gate to go to the next scene. Juliana created a large script that baby-proofed the player into getting items earlier, or spam clicking through the story. She also created the GitHub repo and the starting base of the game. 

Masuma’s scene represents joy with a neighborhood playground. This scene was the closure and resolution to the entire journey of the player seeing how the kid felt with her previous emotions. Masuma designed items that the player has to find around the playground that would make the kid feel joyful. Once the player collects items that would invoke a feeling of joy, you can restart the game. Masuma’s success was creating a script so that the player could walk around and only pick up certain objects as well as create certain aspects of our story. She was responsible for fleshing out the narrative and cutscenes, as well as tying the various scenes together at the end. 

Playtesting

We received feedback mostly on how each of our scenes can better express the emotions we’re trying to convey. For example, the anger scene lacked something to give it a strong feeling of anger. Suggestions included symbols that show rage or implemented an overall red color scheme. The sadness house needed some additional indicators of what's happening in the storyline. Such as what would make a kid in this situation feel sad? What kinds of game mechanics would you use without having to do another repetition of fighting enemies? This is how we confirmed the idea of using heartwarming, nostalgic notes as a symbol of the character feeling sad. For the joy scene, the challenge was figuring out how to make this different from the previous scenes since it's the resolution of the entire game. We needed to emphasize the idea of “happiness” and figuring out how to make that fun and interesting was a challenge. The negative emotions were much easier to plan and design than the positive finale.  Lastly, the anxiety scene’s main mechanic was stealth, however, it needed to be more intuitive for an area that has dozens of objects in the scene. The feedback was that instead of just only avoiding the enemy’s searchlight, the player can use obstacles in the scene to hide behind as another way of avoiding enemies. That way, the player isn’t constantly moving and instead, can plan their route around the shopping center as to how to destroy the enemies.