Game Stories-Digital Game

February 26, 2018

Game Stories - Group Diary - Roxanne H, Dikla, Yiyi

Topics: Character design. The Eliza effect.

Tools: Ren’py

Brief: Meet Emma. Emma is teaching Digital Games at OCAD University. Emma is not much of a morning person; she needs caffeine to function well during her morning classes. The only problem is, after drinking coffee, Emma tends to get, how should we put it… extremely excited, and starts speaking fast.

Your goal is to make Emma speaks in the right paste, so you take notes during the class.

Process:

We start with defining the goal, and the users flow.

We then continue with creating the script based on those scenarios.

We used this tutorial to understand the logic and learn how to create a basic story, including:

A dialogue between characters.

Set a menu - to allow the game player choose an option.

Based on the game player option, change the scenario.

Add pictures of the characters and background

Add background music.

Character design - we created four sprites, each describes different mode: tiered, sad, happy, and caffeine.

And created the coffee cup and background illustration of the class

In parallel, we created the script in Ren’py.
Link to the video before adding the graphics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2azbo-JYZjs
Link to the video after adding the graphics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3gU1ona8Cg

Note:

Errors

Python is very sensitive to spaces/tabs, and it can easily change the hierarchy of the items if you accidentally change those. Once running the script you might get this message “Indentation Mismatch error “which means that there’s an extra space before the line (you’ll get an indication of which line).

Personal Reflection:

I found it needs a lot of logistic thinking when making game stories and it’s super helpful when we sketch the workflow out before actually making the game. It will make the storyline more clear and the personality (reactions to caffeine and questions) of our character more stand out. We keep our main goal in mind when designing the storyline, which is proper interactions with our character to make her speaking at the right speed. The talking speed of our character is crucial for our players to be able to understand the contents she is talking and to make the right choices to win the game eventually. We think of three kinds of interactions which will affect the talking speed: caffeine(speed up), questions(speed up), no questions(speed down),

We chose Emma as our game character because she is the person we’re all familiar with and she has a very special personality that we can work on and possibly exaggerate for the purpose of our game. We spent some time to analyze the personality of our character including adding the talking habit such as “sort of” into the dialog and possible responses to the players.