by Shoup -

Escape Your Room

finalscreen

You’re trapped in your own room. Do you have what it takes to leave?

WASD to move, mouse to look around, click to interact.

PC + Mac

(The Mac build is untested, and might have graphical bugs.)

by Shoup -

Davey Wreden

Davey Wreden is best known as the creator of The Stanley Parable (and later The Beginner’s Guide), both of which we all should have played by now. It’s hard to find much information about his life pre-Parable, since as far as I can tell it was his first real game project. Thus it’s hard to talk about how he got a start making games – there was really only one game that propelled him out of obscurity and into the spotlight.

That being said, here’s how The Stanley Parable got made: Davey was a student at USC, which is one of the top schools for game creation/design. He had been musing about unexplored areas of game design, having recently realized how innovative games could be. He was interested in narrators, and came upon the question: what if you could disobey the narrator of a game? Davey didn’t know what would happen — what COULD happen, so he decided to try to make a game to find out. The result was the original Stanley Parable mod for Half-Life 2, found here: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-stanley-parable

Eventually, a Saxxy-winning modder named William Pugh saw The Stanley Parable mod and contacted Davey with a bunch of ideas and mockups. They continued kicking around ideas with the idea that if the game was fun for them to make, it would be fun for someone to play. The finished product ended up being one of the first games aproved for Steam via the Greenlight feature, and it has since won numerous awards/titles.

by Shoup -

escape your room

Title or Working Title:
Escape Your Room

Description:
A room escape game where the door is unlocked the whole time. Nothing’s preventing you from leaving. Why haven’t you left yet? Get it together. You can’t keep doing this every day.

Art/Research statement:
I want to use environmental storytelling to communicate the experience of depression in a way that dialogue and prose cannot. This will include some instances of surrealism – performing certain actions will have reality-altering consequences that reflect the impact depression has on one’s psyche. Example: after getting out of bed, the other side of the room stretches away to infinity. In order to interact with anything, you will have to make the long trek to the other side of the room, where everything else is. Alternatively, your bed is still right behind you.

I will judge my success based on 1) how well the mechanics reflect depression, in my view, 2) how cohesive the surrealist effects feel (changes should make some amount of sense), and 3) the depth/completeness of the environment + how many options the player can choose to try to escape.

Mock Screenshot

room_mockup

3 Game references Mario Cars 2, Catlateral Damage – purely aesthetic inspiration, with simple low-res models that should be expressive yet easy to create

3 Non-Game References

by Shoup -

‘walking simulator’ idea

When I was younger I was enamored with room escape games, where you are placed in some sort of environment and given a single goal: escape. When given the task of environmental storytelling, I thought that a room escape game would be a good template to use to explore the concept, since each distinct room escape game is entirely defined by its environment. I also wanted to do something semi-autobiographical, so I came up with the following idea:

You are trapped in your room (i.e. a bedroom), looking to get out. The door is unlocked, but you cannot leave. As you interact with the things strewn about your room, the player learns that their character is trapped because they are depressed and cannot work up the motivation to leave. By observing various items and trying to deal with the mess the room presents, you can start to manage your depression enough to get outside.

by Shoup -

notgames/environmental storytelling

When I was playing HerStory for this class, one idea stuck with me – the fact that the sole reward for playing was also the sole mechanic by which you played the game (watching videos and uncovering the story.) There was nothing beyond watching and searching for videos. The entire game was literally nothing more than the backstory – but the interactivity that dictated how this backstory was presented made a massive impact on how the game felt. I strongly agreed with a lot of the tenets of “notgames,” most of all this idea that videogames are defined by their interactivity, and that by utilizing that interactivity, a videogame can become much more than any old ‘game’ or other art medium.

I made a post for the last discussion about how the tactile interactivity of the original version of Sword & Sworcery influenced how I perceived the game – I felt that having to touch the screen made me immerse myself in the game’s environment more than merely clicking would. Another aspect of S&S that I loved was the reversal of the standard ‘growth with progression’ trope found in games like the Legend of Zelda series, where you gain items and health capacity after each boss. In S&S, your max health decreases after each ‘boss’ instead. This reinforces the theme of self-sacrifice that is core to the story of S&S, and further immerses me as a player in the game. The player character is getting weaker as their quest takes a toll on their body – it makes sense that the difficulty should increase proportionally.

Overall these design choices added so much to S&S and allowed me to experience the story and themes in a way I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. S&S was the first game to make me think about how these small design choices could decide whether a game is amazing or awful, which got me interested in game design. The GDC presentation on Environmental Storytelling put a lot of my thoughts on game design into words, and I’m glad to have it as a resource to refer to from this point forward.

by Shoup -

Sword & Sworcery – emotional connection through music and touch

Sword & Sworcery is a point-and-click game originally made for iOS. It has an amazing, almost etherial soundtrack composed by Jim Guthrie. While the soundtrack easily stands on its own, merely listening to it is not at all the same as experiencing it in-game.

Being a point-and-click game, on a mobile device, you must touch the screen in particular locations in order to progress. The game takes advantage of this – after melding the expressive soundtrack with the mechanical result of touching the screen, the end result feels almost cinematic. The mechanics of defeating a boss might just boil down to touching the screen along with the beat, but in-game, the Scythian swings her sword, clashing against the enemy’s projectile, choreographed to match the swelling music. This choreography gives Sword & Sworcery an epic feel, and the physical touch you make in order to enact this choreography connects the you as a player to the Scythian in a way that prose and other non-interactive forms of character development cannot.

When the game was ported to PC, touching became clicking, and I felt like some of this connection was lost. When clicking, you are no longer getting quite the same tactile feedback as when you touch the screen; you interact with the game through the proxy of the mouse pointer. The choreography still exists but its effect is slightly diminished. I suspect the effect might be restored if the mouse click were replaced by a key press, but I’m not sure.

tl;dr: The choreography of Sword & Sworcery combined with the requirement of physical touch in order to enact that choreography engages the player in a unique and powerful way.