reflection on four_months

Written for CART 215: Introduction to Game Design at Concordia University

Charly Yan Miller, April 2019

Bitsy fundamentally offers the tool of space to designers --- it allows players to traverse space in constrained manners, and this traversal is what determine the (narrative) information which revealed to them. Naturally this traversal of space is interpreted literally, as movement of the avatar through a physical room, leading to games which deliver narrative through the piecing together of various dialogues granted through the encountering of objects and sprites. A perfect example of this paradigm is the first section of my game at the residence, where the narrative is pieced together through dialogues encountered via environmental exploration. 

I was inspired by more metaphorical approaches to space and mechanics in games like Dys4ia (Anna Anthropy, 2012) in which movement is the primary way in which players interact with the game but narratively speaking traversal doesn’t always represent literal movement through space. I was also excited by how linear the game is with no fail-state, yet the interaction is clearly still crucial to the experience.

I chose presence as my keyword to pursue throughout the design process, because I thought it would let me experiment with less representational, more metaphorical paradigms pertaining to what the movement of the avatar could mean from a narrative context. My first experiment in this type of design was the sequence in the airplane where the players movement represents the passage of time and the path the player can move in is literally linear. That sequence seemed to get a good response after playtesting so I developed my entire game around these metaphorical levels where the players movement represented the passage of time, or work being done.

It was obvious from playtesting that this traversal was physical taxing to players, and this was leveraged in the weed clipping scene and the math studying seen so that players literally felt like they were doing work. Unfortunately, the texting scene also proved taxing, which was not narratively/aesthetically appropriate.

One of the other main things I took away from playtesting is that I could write more ambiguously and naturally. I learned that players could piece together far more than I expected, and players also didn’t find it frustrating if they didn’t know exactly what was going on narratively.