The digital game I have decided to play for this assignment is called “Twisted City”. The main objective of the game is clicking on or swapping different grids in a way that the streets of the city are redirected or reorganized. Through a first-person perspective, the player’s purpose is helping the city’s major by being his intern. Therefore, during the game, the player needs to follow a series of instructions that come from the major through speech balloons. By following the major’s character instructions and reorganizing the twisted city, the player can pass through different levels that symbolize different areas. In some levels, time is important as the player is given a number of seconds to complete the requested task efficiently. In other levels, time stops being a relevant factor and, instead, the player is given a number of moves. In levels bounded by time, the number of points received increases by the faster the player completes the tasks and once the time is over the player loses the level and needs to start again. However, in levels bounded by moves, the number of points received increases when the number of moves made to complete the task is lower; and the player loses the level when it has no more available moves. The game designs a digital world that tries to imitate real parts of a city with problems that need to be solved, in this case, by the major’s intern.

When the player accesses the game, the screen gives the option to select levels that are unlocked progressively as the player completes levels. By selecting one level, the player enters a space that it seems to be a specific part of the city. The aspect of the city parts changes from level to level. However, all have something in common: the city is overall “twisted”. Once you play you discover the meaning of this word for the game, as it is only the streets of the city which are apparently randomly organized, yet the constructions and buildings seem to be in order. The view of the city is isometric, as the design is 2D but it appears as 3D, and it is divided into equally sized grids. The player is allowed to “move” the grids that contain parts of streets only and not the grids with buildings. Some grids contain a straight part -either vertical or horizontal-, and others a vertex -which appear in different directions. Depending on the instructions of each level, by clicking grids so they change their direction or swapping two of them so they change positions but not directions, the player rearranges the city. The player cannot rearrange the city randomly, but strategically, strategizing time or moves depending on the level, and in a way that the final outcome or route allows a vehicle to go from one construction or building to another. In each level, the major appears four different times from any side of the screen and each time he gives an instruction such as “take the firefighters” to the fire”. The player is expected to rearrange the city so the time is completed efficiently. Once the four tasks are completed correctly, the player can start a new level.

It is interesting to see how the city never ceases to be twisted, as the streets are never organized as they would in real life. Both at the beginning and the end of each level, the streets’ pieces contained in the grids seem to be “messy” -there are always parts that remain unconnected to the rest of the streets. The player navigates the space by moving the mouse around the city and clicking grids to either rotate them individually or swap them with another grid. At first, it was not clear to me how I needed to move the twisted city around so that it becomes appropriate for the tasks’ completion. After randomly clicking everywhere and constantly losing the same level, I started to look for strategies for effective clicking. As some levels provide a limited amount of time or moves, the game always demanded attention. However, it required speed in time bounded levels only and, precision in the ones bounded by the number of moves. I found somewhat frustrating how the game design does allow the player to read the instructions given by the major’s character in the levels where time is limited. This happens because time starts to run as soon as the level starts and before the major’s character has given the instructions.  

Although the twisted city presents some elements from real life, such as a major, buildings such as malls, schools, houses, the firefighters’ center, and even the figure of an intern, the game space is a pretty digital-only one. An intern might have a limited time to complete tasks or limited opportunities for completing them correctly, and the game recreates that with its levels and commands. When the player loses, it has the opportunity to experience the same scenario, which might make the completion of tasks easier due to the process of learning from mistakes. An intern might experience this in real life as well, as failing on a task could give him/her adequate tools to achieve it correctly in the future. In this way, I think the game tries to imitate reality by providing boundaries in time and in ways of doing things. However, the major gives unrealistic commands, because an intern would never be asked to build and repair streets by himself. Also, no real city is divided by the digital grids presented in the game and no cities’ authorities would leave a city with unconnected parts of streets all over the place. In real life, a state officer might not have enough time or resources to complete a specific task again after failing at it.

In conclusion, I would say that the game does a relatively decent job in being intuitive for the player. It gives clear instructions through the figure of the major on what the player is supposed to do. However, it does not give the same clarity in how to complete the requested tasks. The player who is a beginner like me has to navigate the game space by clicking on the grids and experiment what the reactions of its actions are. After a while, the player could feel more comfortable with how to play the game and start thinking on strategies and ways to play more efficiently. The similarities between the aspect of the twisted city and a real city -such as the building and the streets- help the player to understand how the game is played. The player might intuitively try to make the twisted city and its streets look more like a real one, with ordered and organized streets.

The game that I chose for the project is called ‘Cooking Fever’. The game is a point and click game as well as a role playing game. The gameplay involves the player becoming a chef in a fast food restaurant. You are given a soda dispenser, a table for laying out burger buns and a grill to cook the burger patty. In the first level you only have one of each. You start by clicking on the raw patty which moves onto the grill on being clicked. After a few seconds, you are prompted that the patty has been cooked. The player is given a few seconds to click on the patty which moves into the burger bun on being clicked. The player can serve the finished burger by clicking on it. Customers walk into the screen and let the player know what they need through speech bubbles with a picture of what they want. Once given all that they want, the customers leave. They pay according to the amount of time that it took for the player to serve them the food. The more time the player takes, the less money they earn. As the game progresses, the player gets new additions like hotdogs and more toppings for the burgers and hotdogs. The player also has the option to use the coins that they collect in every level to upgrade their equipment by reducing the cooking time and adding more cooking counters. The final objective is to finish all the levels with the highest possible score. This happens by serving the maximum number of people in the minimum amount of time. The condition for passing a level is to serve a certain number of people while also earning a minimum amount of money.

The game space is a restaurant and the player operates specifically in the kitchen. It is made to mimic reality by using sound. For instance, when the patty moves onto the grill it makes a sizzle sound. Also, when the soda is pouring into the glass, you can hear it being poured into a glass. The graphics are also very 3-dimensional which makes the elements look more realistic. However, these 3 dimensional elements are placed in a 2 dimensional space. The creators have used colours and shadows to help create the 3rd dimension of depth but they have not used the z-axis explicitly to establish depth which is an interesting point. Further, in terms of the theme, the background behind the customers in the screen is that of tables and chairs like that in a restaurant which helps establish the theme of the player being a chef in a restaurant rather than in a food truck or anywhere else in a kitchen. The game borrows aspects from the real world in terms of the procedure of cooking which helps the player get used to the steps in just one go. It is very obvious the the cooking process involves cooking the patty, putting it in the burger buns and then serving it. The game uses the same logical procedure without adding any extra and unnecessary steps which would make the player confused and maybe even frustrated.

Creating an environment where the first thing that the player sees after starting the game is pans and cooking utensils, it helps establish the fact that the role that the player will be playing will be that of a chef. The second thing that the player notices is the restaurant background which helps establish the overall environment of the game. The customers are shown walking in and out of the screen horizontally which gives the illusion of them coming into the restaurant even though this is a 2 dimensional aspect (they are only moving on the x-y axis. There is no z-axis involved).  This also helps the player to notice and make a mental note of when a new customer ‘comes in’ and to prepare the anticipated order (for instance, start grilling the burger patty if there are none cooked yet just in case the customer orders a burger so that it would take less time to serve it).

The gameplay is not bound by time directly. However there are a lot of indirect influences. The player needs to take as little time as possible to serve the dishes to get the maximum number of points. The fast-food restaurant theme of the game helps establish this concept since even in real life, the customers do not wish to wait long for their food. This is especially relevant in the case of fast food which is what this specific game is about. So it borrows the element of taking less time to ensure a happy customer from the real world to also help establish the restaurant in the fictional world of the game. It also helps establish the urgency that a chef probably feels in real life because even in that fictional world the player would not want to keep the customer waiting as that would mean less money earned which might lead to failing the level. This element of the game helps the player to also connect emotionally in a small way to a real chef through the fictional world of the game. However, one thing that I found really interesting was that the creators never show what the chef in the game actually looks like. In my opinion this also helps the player feel like they are the chef in that game world because they are not provided with a fictional character who is a part of that world to associate the job that they are performing with. The creators have enabled the players to directly relate themselves to the game world by taking away the existence of a fictional character that exists to bridge the gap between the real world and the fictional world of the game. This game enables the player to use their own imagination to bridge that gap by becoming that bridge themselves.

In conclusion I would like to say that while playing this game I felt that it borrowed a lot of elements from the real world which helped make the process of getting used to the environment of the game very easy. Even though every action required a lot of steps and each step took multiple seconds to finish, it felt very natural. Even doing multiple things simultaneously in the kitchen space felt very natural because I could instinctively understand what I have to do next for every step as I have grown used to it in the real world. At the same time, the game was able to create its own fictional world and characters with the player being given the chance to bridge the gap between reality and fiction on their own without help from a fictional character to represent the real world player in the game.

Dragonfable is an RPG game that has a mixed timeline, the majority of the game takes place in the middle ages, however, there are robots and aliens on the game too. The game is the story of a hero divided into three books and as the game progresses the main story moves forward. The main theme of the game is to get strong enough for progressing the story. The player initially picks a class from the three: mage, rogue, warrior. Experience points enable the player to level up and get stronger. There are multiple elements that make a player strong such as the quality of the equipment (ring, shoes, armor, helmet, sword cape, etc.), distribution of the player stats, and the style of play. The player decides where to spend the stat points gained through leveling up and he can change his class to an advanced one once he progresses enough into the game. There are side quests where a random piece drops, completing enough of these build up a strong character. The player can evolve her character in a direction that she wants through these various actions.

There are various known locations in the game while also many undiscovered areas. Traveling is easy from some locations when we are riding a half eagle-half lion:

The space of the game is simplified by dividing locations into several areas, and the player’s movement is accomplished by moving to different sections of the room like moving to the left section or moving up to the section upwards of the area. Sometimes there are signboards giving information about navigating the map. The player cannot change the room freely because there are usually barricades in the parts where the map ends. For example:

The player cannot move to the left right now because there is a teleport machine, and he cannot move upwards because there is a bush; so the limiting of the navigation is justified through the usage of game elements. Space in the game has a realistic scent to it, the objects and the buildings around the map are realistic. There are also flying islands and such other objects that ignore the law of physics, though most the motion in the game is realistic. The game managed to feed its fictional aspect with these unrealistic objects while also not chopping its root with reality completely so the player is not lost.

The magic concept is strong and is used smartly so the flying island or the teleportation or the undead soldiers are justified while also conveying the theme nicely. There are regular people just like in the real world, but there is also magic that is not a part of the real world. This difference creates another space altering the known traditional rules like death or gravity while keeping others like time, communication through talking, breathing. These changes take the player away from the regular boring world and introduce a more limitless space where the player can freeze a gnome or ride a dragon.

The time concept in the game is interesting. There is no day or night but the events occur in one direction. The game characters evolve and change only between the different chapters. The player does not need to feed herself or go to sleep, so there are no humanly needs. The time moves forward on big leaps but rarely, only on each chapter.

The overall concept of my game was that of a thief escaping the room without being caught by the policemen who are moving back and forth in the room. The objective of the room is to escape the police and the room. The first thing that came to my mind when I heard the word escape was being trapped in a room as well as a thief running from the police. At first I had only incorporated the room aspect of the escape theme and after discussing my game idea in class, I also found a way to incorporate the thief-police aspect into my game.

I started off with the idea of having only two policemen in the room who are moving back and forth. There will be walls in the room which the thief can use to hide from them. Also, the field of vision of the police was supposed to be more than just the direction in which they are moving. I had planned on making invisible boxes and if the thief and police are in the same box then the player would get caught and the game would restart. However, the code got too complicated for my level and I was not able to implement the invisible boxes. Without the invisible boxes, the walls would not make much sense and therefore I decided to change the idea to what it is now. Now there are 7 policemen moving back and forth the room and if the player collides with the police, the game will restart. All the police officers are moving at different speeds to make the game more challenging. Also, I have programmed them to have them alternating speed (for example, the first one is slower, the second one is faster, the third one is slower and so on). Because of this, escaping the police becomes much more challenging. Another obstacle is that the speed of the player is much slower than the speed of the policemen so it is much more difficult to escape from them if you choose the wrong time to start moving downwards. So, even though there are not a lot of visible obstacles in the game, I have tried to make it difficult by including such challenges.

While I was not able to implement my original plan, I felt happy about the final product. When people were playing it in class today, it was nice to see the anxiety building up towards the end of the game which I had intended to happen (with the increasing speed of the policemen). Also, the game did not seem very easy to most people but after a few games, they got used to the controls and were able to finish the game. Therefore, I felt that the game was not very difficult and not very easy.

With more time I probably would have been able to implement the original plan. In fact, in this game I could have figured out how to implement the field of vision code which I could not figure out how to make it work at the moment.

Since Escape the Police is a video game, it can be considered a material, software and cultural artifact at the same time. It is also a cultural artifact because it reflects the social idea of a thief escaping from the police. Whenever we think of a thief, we always think of the relation of a thief with the police as the thief escaping the police.

Here is the link to my code:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/170X1Q2XDHJPPXh8c_TfWIY3kuLAqq2TR?usp=sharing

Too often we live deadline to deadline, making excuses that we will give more time for our relationships or our health after getting that promotion or turning in that specific assignment. And perhaps we do until the next deadline or “level” inevitably strikes. Through Rat Race, I hoped to convey an escape from a life of sleepwalking. In this system, game objects, layout, and freedom of movement are essential elements of my game design, allowing the player to explore this theme through the context of play.

I envisioned the player in a mad race to collect something deemed valuable, but also wanted to show that this specific object was worthless at the end of the day. After struggling with making P5.play’s collision function work with an ellipse, I settled on a green rectangle rotated slightly, though this object could have been designed more abstractly to convey what we want most at an individual level rather than be so strongly associated with money and success. When a player collects the green rectangle, their score increases by 10, demonstrating its value at a surface level. I placed these objects above the player and had them reappear quickly (every 2-3 seconds) to create an instant gratification for the player and create the desire to collect more as quickly as possible while moving upward towards an end. I also wanted to create an object that had no seeming purpose so that the player could redefine what is of value in the game and be reminded of the importance of the little things in life. The saying “stopping to smell the roses” came to mind and hence, the flowers were created. I placed the flowers in locations where the player would have to retrace their path to collect it to challenge the notion that life is a linear progression. When the player collected the flower, there was no feedback other than the flower being removed. I debated this design choice heavily, but decided that since I wanted to user to explore rather than win, I didn’t need to indicate the number of flowers collect. Instead collecting flowers had a less immediate impact, discernible only in the changes to the layout of the game board.

When a flower was collected, I added a new color to the array of colors the background would loop through. Thus, the game background began as gray and became more colorful (looping through more colors) to signify a different richness in life. Additionally, I decreased the number of walls in the maze to signify a breaking free from the path defined by society. Additionally, every other wall also had another sprite who was on their own path. When the player collides with another sprite, they will get sucked into the other’s path unless they take the action to leave that influence.

With more time, I think I could have improved the graphics of the game to be a more cohesive visual experience. I think the flowers detracted from the overall impression of the game in terms of their design and the slightly off collision function. I am, however, satisfied with how the design components created meaning and I think I was able to convey my point across based on conversations with friends who playtested. One friend summarized these two sentiments quite well: “I feel existential now. It was surprisingly impactful for a game that looked like shitty Donkey Kong.”

In The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, the authors discuss how video games are material, software, and cultural artifacts. When I first read it, I didn’t quite understand what Perron and Wolf meant by “the procedural aspects of the meaning making process,” but through creating the game and considering what meaning I wanted the player to elicit from interacting with various components of the system, I was able to understand how Rat Race is a software and cultural artifact. Additionally, though an artifact physically created by me, Rat Race is abstract enough that the player can interpret their own meaning of the escape and this individual decision is reflective of the juxtaposition, should it exist, between the values of a culture and those of the individual.

Escaping from the rat race

Link to game: https://simranparwani.github.io/ratRace/

Link to code: https://github.com/simranparwani/simranparwani.github.io/tree/master/ratRace

To implement my project, I used code from JavaScript with the p5 and p5.play libraries. In order to materialize my initial idea, I used the code to create a player and enable it to move in all 4 directions like a human being would be able to. I also used the code to create lanes on the screen as well as create objects that would represent fast-moving cars. All this was done with the sole aim of re-creating an instance of a person j-walking on a highway.

Despite the fact that my game was still playable to a large extent, the final product lacked some features which I initially intended to add. For example, I intended that for every collision between the player and a car, the player loses speed by a certain factor and upon a number of collisions, the player finally becomes immobile indicating that it has been run over completely by a car and is now dead. However, I was unable to implement this feature in the work due to some limitations of the code regarding frames and how they are read. Also, I was unable to automatically implement different levels to the game in the sense that, to increase (or decrease) the difficulty, the player would have to edit some portion of the code. This could become cumbersome especially if the player is not familiar with the programming language. Despite these shortcomings, I am very proud of my final work since I had no prior experience with programming prior to this project. It has been a good learning experience for me and I am very excited to advance and do more with code.

I believe this project could be considered an artifact in the sense that it was fully conceptualized by me and it is based on a real-life situation experienced by many people on a daily basis. Additionally, even though the game does not fully reflect this real-life situation, it is not far off at all – the various elements of the game come together to provide a good representation of my intentions as the game maker/artist.

In conclusion, I’d have hoped to have had more experience in programming to enable me to make the game a lot more sophisticated and interesting to play. That notwithstanding, I’m grateful for the experience and I look forward to the next project!

LINK TO FILES: https://drive.google.com/open?id=10rFn4jJx66sTfPs02_nw5bhq55-Tzuq6

Find the folder with my game here.

For this assignment, we had to create a simple game that would reflect the uniting “escape” theme. My game is called “Mouse Trap” and its interpretation of the chosen concept is quite straightforward. I gave up on my initial idea posted as a game proposal after receiving feedback from Sarah, which made me rethink my implementation of the escape concept in a play experience. So, my new plan was to create a confined space where the player has to figure out a way of breaking free. After some brainstorming, I thought of the common cognitive learning experiment done with mice in which they have to learn how to navigate a maze in order to find food. I have decided to use this real-life situation as my game design.

The canvas has a labyrinth made of vertical and horizontal rectangles. First, I have tried to copy a maze pattern from a picture that I found online, but it was rather confusing and challenging to position blocks to reflect the original image. Then I thought of generating a random maze design, but I have realized that random placement of walls does not guarantee a certain level of difficulty to the pattern. That’s why I have designed the layout myself on a piece of paper and calculated the locations of each wall. Ironically, this is where the game became difficult for its own creator. Positioning sprites turned out to be very-very time-consuming and tedious. My simple game seems unnecessarily complicated if you glance at the code, which has more than 300 lines just of the wall positioning and coloring. However, after hours of monotonous work I had the labyrinth that I imagined it.

In “Mouse Trap”, the player uses arrow keys to control a grey square that represents the mouse. It moves with a constant speed and the one and only challenge for the mouse is to find its way out of the maze. In order to complicate the game, I have also included certain obstacles on the way that either the player can use in a strategic manner or it can simply make the play experience more dynamic. The labyrinth contains 10 objects: 5 yellow squares that represent cheese and 5 black squares that represent the mouse trap. As the player hits those objects, the speed of the mouse is affected. Cheese slows it down, which is my funny metaphor for being full with food that can be used to focus on the entire layout of the labyrinth, to have some extra time to look around where the mouse should go next. The mouse traps, on the other hand, make the mouse run away from them, so the speed increases and the movement becomes very anxious – truly reflecting the movement of a real mouse in the experiment. The traps complicate the game by disrupting its flow and making the player more concerned with the direction of the mouse rather than the bigger picture of finding a way out of the labyrinth.

These additions to the game may not be understood by the user because of the abstract design, so I have added comments below the maze to imply what happens when the mouse sprite collides with a cheese square or a trap. Also, the mouse changes its color to black when it collides with the walls and the comment bar shows “Be careful!”. Initially, I wanted the collision with the walls to be either the end of the game or a loss of a “life”, but in the process of creating and testing my game, I decided to leave it as an experience of figuring out a puzzle rather than making a race out of it. For the same reason I did not make this game tied to a time limit or a high score. Besides, having a high score makes the user try again, yet the more you go through a labyrinth, the easier it becomes to escape it. So, this would mean that I’d have to design another labyrinth variation, which would take way too much time.

I think of my game as a man-made artifact produced by yours truly, which reflects my own input in its creation and design. More importantly, it reflects and is inspired by a real-life concept of a mouse put into a labyrinth to learn how to get out of it. The usage of this metaphor makes this particular play experience a cultural artifact of a scientific practice. Plus, having the game reflect a theme chosen by a group of people makes it an artifact that conveys a certain meaning understood in a specific context (our class).  This game carries an idea and a meaning shared between people, which makes it a cultural artifact.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I wish I had more time to work on this game and maybe implement some of the suggestions I have received in class. Potentially, the game could also include a cat chasing the mouse, or the cat could be one of the game objects that the mouse had to avoid colliding with.

Link to play the game

Link to the code

My game, Unboxing, is a game about escaping never-ending concentric boxes before they completely enclose you. In a way, the game is about life, where problems keep coming one after another and we may choose to confront them head-on or escape them, but they’ll keep accumulating and coming faster anyway until it becomes impossible to evade them.

Since we had to use low-graphics, I decided to keep the design of the game just as simple, with simple straight-forward aesthetics (just the box, the square, and the score). I also used an 8-bit style font for the text to match the style, which I downloaded here,  music from the game Final Fantasy VII remixed in 8-bit style by the youtuber coatlesscarl, and other 8-bit sound effects from the Free Music Archive.

During the game, I initially wanted to make it so that a box would always slowly appear almost outside of the screen while the smaller one closes in on the player, but I figured that that would be too complicated to implement and would require a lot of memory, which would slow down the game, so I decided instead to just have one box at a time that gets deleted at every iteration and appear again with a hole facing a different way. For the box itself, I created 3 sprites for each one; one is the outer white square, one is the inner blue square, and the last one is the hole rectangle, which is generated at a random direction. At all times, the program checks overlap between the player square and the three box sprites to know whether there is a collision, which was a lot harder to implement than I imagined, but I made it work in the end.

I particularly had fun making the death animation, where the player square’s color transitions to red as it slowly fills the entire screen as if exploding. I think that this was particularly important because of the significance of death screens in this kind of endless-beat-the-high-score games, since the player will spend at least 30% of their time there, and there’s no way to avoid them, but I also made them instantly skippable with the spacebar as not to make them annoying.

One thing that stood out during playtesting is that there were two kinds of players; those who moved the player square and instantly mastered the game, and those who thought the arrow keys moved the boxes. I tried to make it clearer that the player is supposed to move the little square by adding a blinking caption at the top, and I considered adding more signifiers pointing to the movement of the square rather than the box, but at the end of the day I figured that that wouldn’t match the game’s simple aesthetic, and players of the second kind quickly figured out after a few trials and errors how to play the game correctly, so I didn’t see it necessary to implement a big change. I also realized mid-class presentation that the game got slower rather than faster the more people played it, which I think I fixed by deleting unused sprites which cause a memory leak.

My game embraces the fact that it is a computer game with its 8-bit aesthetic, and it works with clearly defined repetitive physics, which are both obvious deliberate choices made by somebody (me) that make it so that it is evident that this is a man-made artifact. Furthermore, while I had the escape-from-your-problems theme in mind, I did not particularly cared about conveying that as much as I did about having a fun playable game that makes you want to play more. What I didn’t have in mind though is that some players reported having a nostalgic feeling thanks to the low graphics and retro sound effects. In this case, they created their own meaning for the game, which gives another symbolic aspect to the artifact-ness of the game.