The Elevator is a reflective journey into space for a sick, old man’s dying wish.
me, myself, and I is a game about identity, sacrifice, camaraderie, loneliness, selfishness, and selflessness.
Mouse and left-click to proceed the story and choose options.
For my final project, I delivered a continuation of two previous projects, with revised scripts, dialogue, and new aesthetics from prior feedback.
For my fixed time puzzle platformer, I’m going with a simplistic pixel art style.
Audio references:
Melotif
Description
A blind-friendly, action music game with little to no visuals. “Jump” (tap a button) in response to melodic motifs as you listen to a song. Each level will have different motifs that require jumping at certain times. Survive the entire song to pass the level.
Art/Research Statement
This game explores the power of music and music alone. I want to create an entire level through rising and falling pitches and dynamics. Can players map different notes to safety or danger? How will they develop a mental model to represent music? Will musicians have an easier time than non-musicians?
I will experiment with different motifs to see how players react, and hear how memorable they are. The goal is to solicit a variety of emotions: in addition to happiness, sadness, or other moods based on the music, I want to give players a sense of wonder, thrill, and achievement at beating a level with only their ears.
Parameters for success include at least 1-2 complete playable songs, as well as a satisfying user experience. If players can learn the motifs and want to continue trying to beat the level, as they might a normal visual game, then I will have succeeded.
Mock Screenshot
There will be very little art. I may add a super subtle visualization (something with colors, e.g. see below) but it won’t be as distracting (the player needs to focus on music, not the visualization).
Game References
Non-Game References
Explore a barren land underneath a raincloud that follows you and reflects your mood.
Idea 1: By standing in place, the rain affects the environment (e.g. watering plants, dying animals). This brings the dying land back to life. As the character gets happier, he becomes more colorful (less gray) and the cloud gets smaller, until it finally disappears.
Idea 2: In a land with many NPCs, everyone is followed by their own emotion cloud. When you approach another character, your moods are averaged. For example, rainy (depression) + sunny (happiness) => cloudy (normal), while cloudy + stormy (angry) => rainy. The game ends when everyone has been converted into a single mood.
I enjoyed the metaphor of walking simulators as “secret boxes,” or a Japanese toy whose beauty lies in the secret motions and movements to open it. There is nothing inside, and really not much of an ending to these games. Yet the narrative arises from the journey and interactions of the player.
While many of these exploratory games come up with amusing interactions, I feel that there are a lot of pitfalls. Point-and-click games with “pixel hunting” (searching for a specific pixel to click on) can often get tedious. Personally, I found Gone Home extremely repetitive: despite a brilliant story, rifling through drawers and cabinets for every single detail got old fast. Sure, the storytelling was solid. But the game itself was BORING.
I believe the key to secret boxes is novelty. Secrets are no longer secrets if they’re constantly repeated. Instead, beauty arises from new and creative ideas. Amanita Design’s Machinarium and Botanicula are good examples of secret boxes that always provide new areas to explore and new objects or creatures to interact with. By constantly designing things the player hasn’t seen before, one can build a great world. That, I think, is the key to a secret box.
A reflective journey into space for a sick, old man’s dying wish.
Character art by Crystal Hou.
Background and music in credits.
It’s not often that one sees a story told without words. Since the fall of silent films, dialogue has captured the basis of human storytelling. But in depicting non-human protagonists, few have tried and succeeded. Wall-E lasted 40 minutes (ignoring recorded human video) with only endearing robotic sounds. Other animated films feature animals, toys, or even automobiles that nonetheless speak the human tongue. So it is with a breath of fresh air that Machinarium enters: a puzzling point-and-click about a robot. Not only is the entire story told, but a vast metallic world is built, filled with other lively robots, all without a single word.
The secret: animation.
The game opens with our hero haphazardly cast out of the city, robotics parts scattered across a broken wasteland. After reassembling himself and maneuvering into the city, bits of story begin to reveal themselves. Occasionally, ideas are told through animated “thought bubbles”: black and white scenes or memories of the past. We see the two baddies bullying him, ruining his sandcastle, and finally stealing his girl and kicking him from the city. Despite the likeness to common tropes, there is something refreshing about guiding a robot through the hero’s journey back into a bizarre yet beautiful world. Every movement has character: the slightly clumsy but endearing struggle of the protagonist; the greedy shoveling of food into the fat nemesis’ belly; the lazy slump of the guard on duty. Coupled with the art and soundtrack, these tiny details build up a wonderfully crafted world of robots and metal parts, all without a single word of dialogue.
me, myself, and I is a game about identity (9 of them), sacrifice, selfishness, and selflessness.
