MIND

MIND - Expressive Game Design Project

Inspirations

As this course and project was all about meaning within video games, I only thought of what I can think of on my own. I mainly want to make games where I can somehow inspire others and give them an eye-opener of things that may matter as life goes on. Making games that players can take in as experience and remember the contents and themes are what inspires me to make a game like MIND. As this was going to be my first finished game that I made by myself I wanted to experiment on how I can bring meaning to my game and also make it simple yet effective as making it too complex can be confusing and may take a long time for me to implement. Environment and placement of objects with little in-game text was what I want to go for when making this game as I find it more appealing and appreciate taking in the themes of a game without it telling you.

Pictures of game play:

I developed the main room with the five doors first to test out scene switching. Next, which was the longest parts of the project, were creating all the menus (main menu, pause menu, settings menu, etc.) including its panels and functionality. Afterwards I moved on to each of the areas within the doors individually from left to right. Lastly, I do multiple tests to check and fix any inconsistencies and major bugs.

Big ideas:

I had some interesting ideas that I wanted to implement but I could not figure out how I would be able to implement them. One idea I had which I found that would be cool was having the rooms from left to right be named as an area name with each of the first character of the name be part of the title MIND. For instance I had the idea to name the grass area ‘M’eadows and the island area ‘I’sland but the desert and space/moon areas was hard to implement names beginning with ‘N’ and ‘D’ without disrupting the pattern of the time and day passing (day to night) from the left to right. Maybe ‘N’owhere and ‘D’eath might have worked although I found it to be a stretch. Another big idea I had was enabling random discouraging messages appearing from side to side automatically as the player walks within the areas towards the clipboards. This would emphasise the player being pressured and judged upon as they get older. Lastly, an idea I also had was slowing down the player’s movements as their go through consecutive doors further emphasising of the player growing old and possibly making the player unable to jump as they do get old. Maybe for the space area I have the player move extremely slowly and very close to the ground as if they are crawling for survival.

If I had more time, I would flesh out my game from bugs, for example the player can still move while the password panel is opened. The player’s ability to jump was not used in my game so I would include some obstacles in the areas as the areas are quite empty even though it emphasises the character’s loneliness. I would also tidy and polish the game up especially with its very simplistic menu designs.