From our ideation on Tuesday, we really liked the premise of an anthropomorphic daikon radish set in the supermarket. However, anything beyond that was uncertain. Given those in mind, I drew (and annotate here) three ideas, a moodboard, and a Spotify playlist for inspiration.

Idea 1

The first idea is a game like Untitled Goose Game, or Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, but with a wholesome twist. Rather than being chaotic evil or committing crimes, the story would follow a daikon that starts out as a seed from a gardening store that gets planted and finds that its friends are plucked and shipped to a supermarket (via a shed and by truck). This would be an enacted narrative, with the story being one of heroism and triumph over silly human’s plans to sell vegetables at a supermarket. This idea also took inspiration from the Bee Movie, where in the movie the bees lawyer up against humans in a case of honey production.

Idea 2

The second idea is a tower defense game, much in the same narrative as idea 1. As labeled in the sketch, the trucks carrying the captured daikon friends are essentially the “bloons,” and the daikon can employ the help of local good Samaritans like wildlife to help stop the trucks from reaching the supermarket. The twist is that the daikon friends need to be helped after the trucks are “popped,” and that there would be other alternative modes of transportation, such as an airplane playing the role of a MOAB-type tanky “bloon,” and that the map would be zoomable to certain sections, increasing the importance of space. Furthermore, to stress the importance of space in this design, each section of road has its own POI that it is located near, kind of like the narrative arc, where each POI has its own local aides that help Daikon boy stop the trucks. For example, the forest could have beavers that create a dam to block the road, slowing the trucks down, a resource not found in other locations across the map.

Idea 3

This idea takes more inspiration from games like Cookie Clicker, AdVenture Capitalist, Placid Plastic Duck Simulator, Clusterduck, and surprisingly enough Forest (which may or may not be considered a game: it may be more suited for CS247B than CS247G), all of which are AFK-based games. This removes the supermarket entirely from the equation, and instead focuses on the bucolic feeling of farming daikons. The goal is to collect all sorts of daikons, which can be obtained by manipulating the environment, which result in a daikon with certain attributes. This could be determined by GPT and LLM-based paradigms such that there is an emergent narrative of the infinitely many kinds of radishes that could be harvested. Ignore the crazy idea, I am not a proponent of NFTs, but my creativity told me that it is a possible fallout of such a game.

Moodboard

Given my themes above, I knew that it was going to be a cutesy theme. With idea 2, it was going to be a juxtaposition of an adorable character doing uncharacteristic things, while in the third one, as a submission game (from the MDA framework), it just fit to go with that kind of theme. Thus, I chose corresponding moods: the Pokémon Emerald map as well as the screenshot from Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion go for the 16-bit top-down style that I wanted to go in. The happy daikon and the screenshot from Cooking Companions serves as an inspiration for what the actual character should look like. The fields provides a nice sunny look that should permeate the whole game, as I would want the game to be more light and upbeat. Finally, the screenshot from Mario Odyssey shows what I would want the juxtaposition of the main character with the actual people to be like: a small character that is pretty noticeably unrealistic but can communicate with the people.

Spotify Playlist

Many of the music in this playlist reflect the upbeat atmosphere that the game creates: Super Bell Hill, the first subject in Ponyo, PokéPark, and Super Mario World are all simple, stable chords and chord progressions that don’t really venture beyond the diatonic. Sneaky Snitch and Boum! are more mischievous moods achieved through more transients, and Pokémon Center and Romance are simple, memorable melodies that I hope to emulate in our game’s music.