Geez…
It’s been…what a month and a day since my last blog post? Goodness. I’ve been really neglectful with my blogging duties. I suppose I’ll just have to make an effort to blog a bit more, whether that be about ideas for my big game (which will be more likely considering our playtesting sessions are coming to a close). However, I guess it would be best to summarize what has happened in the past month since the Gamification challenge (which could have been a lot more successful than it was). From here on out, I’m going to be doing bi-daily or daily blogging posts about whatever needs to get blogged about. It shall be done.
So what have we done? To be honest it’s hard to backtrack four or so weeks, but I will do my best.
The first thing that comes to my head is the Bridging Assignment which was meant to simply connect the dots for our big game. Dr. Kayler seemed to like mine, though quite frankly it was so rushed and thrown together in such a mess that I’m surprised it received such high praise. Either way, I’m not complaining. So now I have an idea to express in my game. I still am very unsure as to how I’m going to put this across in my gaming pitch, but I have some creative ideas up my sleeve. Aaron has stated interest in this creative endeavor and so hopefully I’ll be able to pull this off. I think the big idea I want to portray is some kind of story with branching storylines. I wanted to make something a lot more overarching but in the time since this I have realized this idea is impossible. Why? Well because stories are meant to be linear. If I want to tell a specific story, then I will make sure that it reaches one point. As long as the end point is reached in some way, it will be okay. So the journey can be dynamic, however the end will not be. It’s simply impossible. It’s why Until Dawn was so successful; the dynamic journey to the dynamic endpoint. The end point, despite being determined by choices, was the same throughout. The only thing that changed was how many characters were alive.
The next thing that I did was play test my Challenge 3, which was also somewhat connected to this idea. In my game, “Last Light,” players take on the role of several characters trapped in a house with a murderer. This murderer is giving them a limited amount of time to explore the house and find a weapon to defend themselves (for some reason that I never really figured out), but they can also discover clues that they can use to their advantage (such as finding clues to use to their defense if they are ambushed in one of the rooms). I play tested both in and outside of class, and both were successful in terms of what I was looking for, and pretty much proved the point I discovered in my last paragraph; stories are linear and are meant to be linear. With the constructive criticism I received, the game was turning into a “Dungeons and Dragons” type game, which wasn’t what I was looking for. I have a story I wanted to tell, and I want one outcome.
Today, we did our Iron Challenge, and lost. But that was okay! We learned that we need to work on our presentation a bit in terms of pitching to non-gamers and the Sharks during Shark Tank. Other than that I had fun. And this blog post was fun. Maybe I’ll write more. I hope so.
