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: