I’ve made a great deal of progress on the creep game. I’ve titled it “Rig the Vote”. So creative, I know. I wanted to take some time to highlight the feature of the game as it stands now, since a majority of the work that will take place before my project presentation will be balancing and bug fixes.

Added features:

• Creep lawyer acts as surveillance - the lawyer will enter the screen randomly. If you close booths or shove creeps away from booths while he’s present, you get a strike. Three strikes and you lose the game. Strikes are indicated in the bottom right of the screen with boxes that get red x’s as you gain strikes.
• Orange creeps vote for the underdog at any given point in the game. If blue is losing, they will side with green and vice versa. If the side are tied, then the vote will be random.
• Creeps giving up - when creeps are shoved around, they lose speed and eventually give up. This is indicated by increasing transparency, or the “ghost effect” increasing. However, when creeps re-spawn (this is the result of making it easier on myself to manage sprites in Scratch), they come back at a slightly faster speed. Although I’m not sure if this creates a paradox or not for the way things might actually work in real life, it makes the game more challenging in a good way. It also adds another point of strategy the player must consider.
• Creep dialogue - although this is not perfect in terms of its frequency, the creeps have speech bubbles throughout the game that give the player more information about the agendas and biases of each color of creep. I’ve worked towards trying to get them to come up less frequently than when I initially implemented the feature because the visual noise makes what they’re saying get lost. Having an occasional speech bubble come up seems to make it easier to observe rather than just serve as an annoyance when all you’re trying to do is look for the color of creep you want to shove out of the way. 
• End states - there are five different end states: blue wins, green wins, blue wins as the result of great influence by orange (at least double the amount of total orange votes as blue votes), green wins as the result of great influence by orange, and the lose state which is voter fraud detected. The first four end states don’t necessarily indicate that it is a good or a bad thing that the game as ended in the way it has. It depends on how the player aligns themselves politically and what’s important to them. The true lose state is getting busted for rigging the election.

UI enhancements:

• Splash screen with option for instruction screen. Intro specific music.
• Game play screen background - randomizes between white tile floor and gym floor. This would be something that I would use for play testing to determine which look people like better.
• Vote status bars changed to indicate where voting starts, yet still shows which color each is associated.
• Stats at end for total number of votes cast and total number of creeps given up based on color are spoken by representative creeps.
• End state screens - used a newspaper clipping featuring a headline and teaser article text to give more of a narrative for the game beyond the game play. This sets up the game for future levels where the next set of rules will change based on the result of the previous level. Choose your own adventure game books FTW!

I’m actually very excited about where this game can go and how it can be enhanced with more work both on the logic, content, and technology behind it. Further, after discussing how this fits into the greater scheme of educational value, I see this being a great supplement to a unit of curriculum on voter rights and the history thereof. 

Here’s some screen shots of the game as it stands now:

I’ve had two playtesting sessions with my game, one this past Wednesday with a few folks at the game salon, and another with a co-worker’s kids. I’ve also tortured my fiancé and received some feedback from him. Overall it’s been pretty consistent and I have some objectives I’ll be trying to meet before the week is up:

Problem: There is a lack of consequence within the game play. Basically, why should I chose one color over the other? There needs to be something to influence the players actions…
How to address it: I’m going to add some think/say bubbles to the creeps. I’ve compiled a list of potential things they can say in the game as they walk around, such as “green creeps don’t belong!” and “but we’re all just creeps”… I’m hoping this will give the player a hint of what the colors represent and at least they’ll be clued into what the result of the game might be.

Problem: Status bar needs numbers or another way of letting the player know who is winning
How to address it: I’ve been having trouble getting numbers to appear next to the status bars, so one thing I may do is indicate where the bars end so they player can know how close their side is to winning/losing.

Problem: Lack of sound and background
How to address it: I had the discussion of background with Rafael, and we determined that I needed to be comfortable with the idea of a white background and assess whether or not a background would actually add anything to the game. One of the play testers noted that he thinks a background would make it a little less boring. I’m not sure what to do with this, so I’ll dwell on it for now. As far as sounds, I agree. I’ve been able to get some stock, license-free music from Ted, so I will be picking sound out for the game implementing it this week. One interesting idea I had from a play tester was to cue in the player what was going on through music… so if the evil creeps were winning, ominous music would play, and if the good creeps were winning, then happy music would play. I could see how this could potentially be awkward, so the transition from one to the other would needs to be pretty subtle…

Problem: Color choice of creeps
How to address it: On the group of boys I play tested with this weekend, I asked their opinion on the creep color. I showed them brown/yellow creep art, and they thought that although the current colors were arbitrary, using the brown/yellow colored creeps instead would likely be offensive to people. I agree - I think that using blue/green/orange abstracts it enough and the player won’t necessarily have the same potentially negative reaction to an evil blue creep as opposed to an evil brown creep. The flesh toned creeps would be way too loaded…

Other ideas resulting from play testing:

• Find a way to reward the player with more bits of information as they play…
• Different levels that would represent precincts/states. Player would see blaance of the result of game play between levels. Overall result of all levels would be an cumulative election result. I love this idea but not sure I have time to work with it.
• Give an option for the player to see the voting platform of the candidates… not sure if would reveal too much.
• Campaign signs and trumpets… (led to my idea of creeps saying things to the player)
• Win lose screen could be an animation?
• More booths and/or more creeps (had a total of 12 creeps that were re-spawning for testing sessions)

I have a basic, but playable game that I’ve been working with for the past couple of weeks. Woohoo!

In getting it ready for some play testing sessions, I’ve been able to identify the initial shortcomings of my ideas. Here are some of the design changes I’ve made while putting it together:

• Gates changed to actual voting booths - The gates just weren’t doing it for me. It felt too arbitrary and I felt like it abstracted the whole thing too much. Voting booths relate it to the real world situation a little bit more, and at least I feel like these creeps have more of a purpose… to vote!
• “Shoving” creeps away from the booths - While I was initially testing the game, I felt like I was just watching them go into the booths and I needed some way for the player to interact more with the game. I decided to have the creeps be shoved away on click. This mechanic feels like it has the potential to be somewhat powerful… at this point, I have the creeps slowing down as they keep getting shoved. Not sure this is really doing anything though other than making it easier for the player to win. I may try it the opposite way… when a creep gets shoved, it moves faster. I need to work with this a bit more, but I think there’s something that can be valuable there, I’m just not sure what yet.
• Creep art - I realized that my creeps were looking pretty rough because Scratch does not like 24 bit PNGs… lame. So I tried both 8 bit PNGs and GIFs. This causes a problem though: I had a color touch test on the voting booth (when touching the grey vote button, hide the creep and increment the vote). These other formats leave a bit of a white/grey “halo” around the creeps and when they were touching each other; they were meeting the hit test. For now I changed the button color to blue but I need to think about what I want to do with it some more. I also created actual nice start and end screens… I’m pretty happy with those overall.
• Status bar - I added a status bar for voting. I’ll discuss this more in my next post about playtesting, but it needs some work. The problem I’m having right now is figuring out a way to display the vote variable from the bar sprites (using think or say).

This week, I’m planning on getting my documentation and paper written (started but really slacking off on the written part of my project). Yikes! Lots to do…

After reading through oiligarchy postmortem a few questions about my own work have come up. First of all,  what does putting the player in a position of “privilege” do for my message? Does the game play and mechanics represent the politics of the situation? What is necessary to add/take away from the game in order to help the player understand systematic discrimination?

Making the decision to put the player in my game in the “bad guy” position is a concern to me because initially, I thought that it might undermine my message or at the very least, make the game seem too cynical. However, it seemed to be the most powerful way to get the idea of systematic discrimination and polarization across because the player is directly responsible by stamping each character in an effort to assist or keep them from passing through the gates. Where I find it’s going to be effective or not is in the feedback, and right now in my proto, I don’t see it being effective in two reasons. First, is the overlord character’s getting angry enough feedback for the player to care or not? Does it matter whether or not Tom Tancredo is angry? What matters is what the overlord can DO as the result of his satisfaction/dissatisfaction. So, there needs to be some way the player is affected as sneetches go through the gates or not. How does the game get more difficult or easy based on gate input? The second reason feedback in my game is lacking is that there is no “good” that results from “good” actions (such as allowing brown sneetches to go through the gate). Is this necessary. And what type of “good” happens? Although I don’t want these good actions to be directly rewarding the player in the sense that it helps them win the game, there needs to be a reason and motivation for the player to be curious enough to be defiant…

In terms of conveyance of politics through the gameplay, the mechanic of stamping the sneetches has the potential to be very powerful (although in my proto it feels kind of janky due to convoluted code :P ). Right now I don’t think it’s too terribly powerful because I only have a small amount of characters to work with, but once I get the individual sprite code hammered out for one and I’m able to easily duplicate them, I think there will be something there due to an increased number of characters on the screen. The reason being one, the amount of chaos the player has to manage and two the feeling of dealing with the mass discrimination will come across (I hope). Again this goes back to the feedback for the player and the visualization of winning/losing the game. 

So what I need to hash out this week…

1. Determine different types of feedback that occur throughout the game play - it needs to be more than just an angry/happy overlord. Sounds like I need to actually start writing my game design document since I’ve been lazy about that. I will do that this week!
2. Improve individual game code so it’s easier to duplicate characters (right now it’s a bit of a pain). Not sure if it’s possible but worth a try. Hopefully if I’m able to make the character code more efficient, the game will feel less janky.
3. Work on game art. Although it’s just a proto at this point, I’m seeing the need to spend a little more time working on the characters, gates, overlord and I need to figure out backgrounds.

Questions? Comments? Derogatory remarks?

So after a week of trying to come up with some sort of idea based around Dr. Seuss’ “Sneetches”… here’s goes nothing…

Game goal: Keep all of the “sneetches” from passing through the various gates in the gameplay space by stamping them with symbols that do not allow them to pass…

So each gate will have a symbol, and in order to pass through a gate, you must have the corresponding symbol. You stamp the sneetches by clicking on them, with each click cycling through the available symbols… star, x, circle, square for example.

What would be interesting would be to build relationships among the sneetches depending on what stamps they had. Would you have a situation where the star’d sneetches would hoard together? That would be a very bad situation for the player if they found their way to the star gate while you were dealing with another sneech situation.

In order to visualize the success, I want to bring in a mayor/overlord sneetch, maybe, that would get angry or stay content based on how many sneetches you’re allowing to get through the gates.

A couple of concerns without having built this out… is the clicking mechanic going to be too easy? Is there a way to make this harder?

Is the relationship thing making it too complicated?

Should I have two types of sneetches… those you want to get through the gates, and those you don’t want to let through? Are two types of sneetches enough (I think at least two might be necessary so I’m able to get my message across…)?