Tag: Reflection

Before starting the reflection for creating DMD’s Revenge, I wanted to mention that I feel like our group slacked off when naming this game prototype. We kept the placeholders we used while writing. The only name that appears in the game, DMD, is actually a shorthand for “someone unlucky” as we jokingly decided to call him since he never made an appearance alive.

In the process of creating the game, my main role was to add in detailed descriptions for each of the scenes, making sure the tone of the game is consistent, and putting everything together using Twine.

The story of our game was inspired by an episode from the Japanese TV series, “Unnatural”. Before deciding on the subject of our game, we were stuck when deciding what social issue we should address. One of our members brought this episode and bully up as a theme. After that, while Wendy and Elaine wrote the main storyline, Roy and I worked on adding selection choices and details in scenes to make the story more interactable and game like. While writing out detailed scenes for the game, I tried to shift the perspective of the player onto different characters, hoping to increase their curious about what’s going on.

Looking back at the game, I’m pretty happy with what our group has created. DMD’s Revenge seems more like a visual/interactive novel as it is more plot based with less controllable options and paths to take. If we were to make this game fully, I think we could add in a lot more details into the suicide case itself, making it more of a suspense and even almost a detective game.

We could do this by developing a more complete and complicated case. Then, by adding more in depth interactable characters, a hint collecting system, and making different pathways for players to take based on hints that lead to different endings, give the players more control over their character in the game. Adding on to that, while players shift perspective onto other characters, we could write out parallel ongoing stories with actions that affect other character’s choices. This would improve characters’ development in the game and make the game much more playable repeatedly.

In terms of visual and audio, while it’s good to add them, it’s better to keep them limited to have the players focus on the plot and use their imagination for scenes through descriptions from the text. For example, some background noises of people talking could be added to the classroom scene and some sort of stream notification sound for the stream watching scene. Visuals we could incorporate into the hint system for players to observe and obtain some information.

Aside from the detailed writing, telescoping has been a very important skill as I needed to keep the main plot in mind while managing different options and descriptions for scenes, making sure they make sense and connect to finally make up the whole story.

The plot of our Twine game is inspired by a Japanese tv series called Unnatural Death. We adapted from one of the episodes. The main character of our story is a forensic doctor and a bunch of high school students. In the story, the main character DMD undergoes tremendous school violence and begins to seek a solution to change his life. Due to the extreme mental trauma he received, he decides to commit suicide and try to impute his death to the one of the students that has been bullying him. The truth is discovered eventually, which means the main character failed to do so. By the end, we want people to pay attention to school violence, to actually understand what bullying is, which is not a simple physical attack between students. 

The creation process was smooth, four of us decided to split the work. Therefore, we didn’t assign roles. Since I was the only one in our group that had watched the tv series, I wrote the original plot of the game first, and my group mates revised the plot to be more game-like. I think we did a great job choosing the topic, and setting up the framework.

In the Twine game project, the four of us split the roles fairly evenly while we worked together on the scripts on a shared Google document. We set up a time to meet for several consecutive days to brainstorm ideas for the game. Very instantly we have decided that we want to create a story that would have been as intriguing as a movie or tv drama. Thus, we each have our suggestions and eventually agreed upon Wendy’s suggestion, a story from an episode of a Japanese TV show “Unnatural Deaths”. At first, the rest of us were doubtful of the plot since we have not watched the show. Therefore, we took the time to understand its plot in order to add our own twist to it. We developed a connection of the episode to a social issue that we have discussed in this class, which is peer bullying, a prevalent issue in education systems all around the world.

My main job was revising the script plot transcribed by other group members, turning to into a more game-like format, adding fun choices to the game that would increase playability, yet forcing the players to come back to the main plot eventually. This was very difficult to achieve since the only way to show the play-through logic on Google Doc is through text. As a result, we created various reference points so the players and jump back and forth through the story. I am very pleased and proud of our end result. I think we have come up with an adaptation of the story that is more closely related to our lives as American students while shaping the game into an interactive, playable story. I think this will definitely benefit me in my future writing experiences, since writing come in many different forms and one of them could be writing an intriguing story for a specific, targeted audience so they can understand an issue that I am trying to convey.

My most important contributions to the group project was to compose a whole story (from start to finish) about one of the three characters that we had. Our group designed a deductive game that players followed along the stories of three inter-related characters who live in the New York City during the Covid-19 pandemic. We separated the work pretty evenly between the four of us. From the beginning, we brainstormed a general framework together that we would start with a few characters, each with their individual story, and eventually let the players know if their character was infected by the Covid-19 or not. During the writing process, several of us ran into questions and we found ways to help each other and solve problems like how long we should write for each link, how we can develop three distinct characters while having them do the same thing (like go to work), etc. We presented to our class in a succinct manner, aiming to attract curiosity from our audiences to try our amazing game. I’m proud of our twine game, and I believe players would feel surprised and happy about the overall experience of playing. If I had the chance to do it over again, I would make the story of each page shorter and each option underneath that story simpler. I found that it was hard to track the logic and quality of the writing as we accumulated multiple complicated paragraphs.

I developed new skills to create a new game for myself. This is my first time doing so and definitely a dream-come-true moment. Growing as a kid, I played lots of games, and I always wanted to make a game on my own and let all my friends know “hey, I made that.” However, before this opportunity, I was also somewhat hesitant and lacked knowledge of technological tools to put together a game of myself. So I feel grateful of this course and this project. It really helps me fulfill my dream. And for certain, this twine game was not perfect; however, I think it was a big and meaningful first step for me as I found great passion in making new games that entertain people.

Feeling interested? Come and play our game by downloading here.