Game
Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated by games. As a student I have created a few games over the course of a few months. All of these games were created as a part of a group and were developed together.
This VR game you see here was requested by a client who is part of the green ambassadors within the Hanzehogeschool. She wanted us to create a game that would help them in the process of having a smoke free campus in a few years. With these requirements we were able to produce this game.
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While doing both research and interviews, we found out that everyone already knows the effects of second hand smoking. So making a game that would raise awareness about that would not truly make a difference since most of the smokers already went out of their way to smoke away from people. However what a lot of them didn't know about was third hand smoking. This is when the nicotine particles sway through the air and stick to people that are even further away. Causing about 30% of the damage second hand smoking does.
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With this goal in mind we set out to create a game around that. The main concept was that you are a concierge and have to walk around the campus and make sure that everyone is smoking within the designated area, ensuring that not everyone becomes affected by third hand smoke. at the end of the game the player can see how well he did during this process.
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Some of the challenges this project had was firstly, the group size. We were four people consisting of 1 Artist, 1 Developer, and 2 Designers. Due to this we had to scope down a lot of our ambitions. This also caused extra design problems as the developer sometimes had trouble with some specifications we made, causing us to reevaluate how we proceed with the design. A second issue was that we had never worked with VR before. This also caused a lot of our initial concepts to go to waste as VR brings a lot of restrictions. However it also taught us a lot about the importance of immersion and have driven that point further with the way we presented the game.
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During the presentation of the game we didn't have a tutorial in game as we didn't have time with our small group size. So our solution was simply to address this within the way we presented our game. We disguised it as an interview where we were to recruit new members. During this interview, we explained what we were all about as if we were a company. If the person then consented to participating. We explained how to play in regards to "work safety". This was quite well received amongst peers.
The first game that I have created was called Culture Inc. The main goal of the game was to create awareness of certain elements of countries and their attributes.
The theme was based on a business setting where you would recruit countries to work together and the closer all the numbers were to each other (meaning their ideologies are similar) the better your score.
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the most notable thing about this game is its simplicity and learning values. It teaches you why someone from a specific culture might act one way. This might clear up some confusion between people and their future interactions.
During the design process of this game we have hit multiple roadblocks. Initially we planned on having the games target audience be for those who are intrigued or want to avoid awkward encounters with different cultures (culture shock). We had researched social competence and found numerous data about every country and their values. However they were all values recorded within a business setting and could not be applied to regular encounters as proficiently. As a designer we had simply decided to make the game a business game after this conclusion. We adapted to the target audience as they are more appropriate for the setting we had created.
The second game that I have created was called Parlevinken and is Dutch for talking continuously (this is an abstract definition).
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The game revolves around the element of getting old people to play together and get to know more people within their elderly homes. the rules of the game are simple, you pick a topic card and on those cards there are a prompt. You then have to tell everyone a real story about yourself or something you remember that has to do with the prompt.
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A similar key feature is that the game is simple enough for everyone to understand and participate with.
During my course of game design, I have also created a website with my team. The theme of the website was tiny houses and everything surround it. We made our main menu different as some elements of this screen are clickable. For example the roof is the house builder (a mini game where you can design your own tiny house). The mailbox is info, cloud is contact, etc. This was a nice project as it allowed us to create a game on a website on a topic that is generally quite mundane.
This was one of the later projects I have worked on. The concept of the game was to create an emergent game within the span of 8 weeks. We started off with a different concept, more specifically a game that would raise awareness to child abuse. We went through a tough design process and went through three and a half weeks struggling and investing a lot of time on the project. Since this is such a heavy topic, we were not allowed to make mistakes to avoid controversy. At the end of the three and a half weeks we had decided that it would be more beneficial to scrap the concept and our time invested to start over with a different concept. It was then that we decided to create the hack and slash game we have today.
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The design process in this game went a lot better. We had a concept, story and mechanics relatively quickly. Now the main issue we had was the creation of immersion. After long sessions of pondering, we had come to the idea of crafting. The general idea of having the player scavenge the surrounding for item and increase his stats seemed like a great idea. The next element we had to think of was what we wanted the player to be able to craft. We started off with the general weapon and armor upgrade, however we decided to settle with a potion crafting system. The potion crafting system was an interesting mechanic to add as we could create creative potions that had a variety of effects. We also of course had to make sure that everything was balanced which took hours to make the game fair.
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During the last weeks of the design process we were noticing that the developer was struggling to keep up with the amount of code he had to create. After evaluating I decided to step in and help out the developer with the code. This was a close call as we effectively were able to finish the game just in time for the demo itself.