Disruption is chaos, the kind that takes a state of being and transforms it irrevocably. Recent conversations with peers revealed the natural chaos of the semester. I also recognized that this game would be played at the IM showcase and thought that the players would relate to this concept considering that it is the last week of classes.

In the beginning of the semester, we tend to be more exploratory and we hope to thrive. Somewhere along the way, slowly and then all at once, we become engulfed in this chaos where we merely hope to survive and we begin living deadline to deadline without realizing the disruption that we allow these externalities to have on our lives. Eventually, we have to find balance amidst the disruption which is what I hoped to convey through my game.

To implement this concept, I began with a runner game in which the player could move in all directions with a fixed speed, having to avoid obstacles. The runner game style appealed to me because friends have often said that the semester begins to feel like a mad sprint until the end, so I wanted to convey that feeling of constantly being on the move. From there, I decided that the player should only be able to move laterally, having no control over when the obstacles approach them, giving it a more chaotic feel. I wondered what effect hitting the obstacles should have on the game. In my first iteration, upon colliding with the obstacles, the player completely stopped and would only be able to move after hitting the spacebar several times. In this iteration, I also implemented a gray box inside the player that expanded when colliding with the obstacles. However, I realized that I wanted this gray box to expand constantly over time and that once it reached a certain size, the player would be unable to move. I wanted to reinforce the importance of self-care, so I used the action of clicking the spacebar as recharging and shrinking the size of the gray box. In the next iteration, I added the concept of moving towards your goals. I had a slider for speed and a slider for goal. The speed slider would naturally determine the player’s velocity and the goal slider would determine the number of obstacles. The sliders, however, felt very clunky and annoying, so I removed them. Instead of the speed slider, as recommended by our class presentation session, I used the up and down arrows to control speed. This more directly related to my goal for the player to determine the speed they liked best and felt more comfortable navigating the game in. I removed the goal slider and, with it, the concept of setting your own goal level. Instead, I wanted to show how in the beginning we start out with these goals, but at some point in the semester, it becomes about avoiding the obstacles rather than moving towards these more exploratory aims. Thus, I changed the number of obstacles to increase as one progresses through the game. With these various elements of speed, obstacles, goals, and recharging oneself, I hoped the player would find their own individual balance. After a few rounds of playtesting, I realized I needed more instructions, so I added instructions to the sidebar and a warning message to use the spacebar to recharge if the gray box reached a certain size. I also tried to have feedback for every player action. Thus, overlapping a small square would increase the player’s goal progression as displayed on the sidebar and change the player’s color to signify the transformative nature of those interactions. Hitting the obstacles would decrease the goal progression. I tried to add positive and negative sounds to emphasize the valence of these interactions but I found that it really decreased the performance of the game, so I deleted the sound files. I also played around with the initial speed of the player a lot. Starting it too slow made the game too easy and too high, too hard. I used an initial speed on the faster side because I wanted the player to use the up/down arrows to find the speed that works for them.

Through comments made during playtesting, I was generally satisfied with the mechanics in realizing the concept. After adding the instructions and starting the obstacles later in the game, players interacted with the small squares immediately and saw how it increased their goal progression. Most players caught on that it was impossible to reach their goal without slowing down from the high initial speed and found the pace that worked for them. After I added the warning message to recharge, players realized the concept of self-care and began using the spacebar to decrease the size of the gray box. I was a bit frustrated and disappointed in all the time I spent on implementing my original game idea, but in the end, I realize that scrapping it and implementing The Semester was a better option. I just wished I would have realized it earlier and spent more time on the graphics of the game. Though I wanted to use a geometric form to make the game more abstract, I think the game would have had a better overall feel with a nostalgic, 8 bit graphics style. In summary, I am overall happy with the concept, the mechanics, and the players’ understanding of the game elements, but wish I had developed the overall aesthetic and feel of the game more.

Link to game: https://simranparwani.github.io/projectFinal/finalProject.html