Possible Name: “Hangxiety”
Emotions:
- Mischievous : It shouldn’t be too obvious and the clues should continue presenting new challenges – However, the challenges are not insidious or unsettling, but more so light-hearted
- Disorientation: Since the premise of the game is based on the day after a night out, we want the character to feel the confusion, wooziness, and disorientation associated with that starting from the beginning of the game (when they first “wake up”)
- Nostalgia: We want this game to evoke 2000s nostalgia, especially the youthfulness and absurdity of the gossip culture in that era.
Synopsis:
The morning after your 21st birthday party in LA, you wake up hungover unlike you’ve ever been before. You completely blacked out the night before. Nothing registers, not even how you found your way back home. Your phone is missing, but you’re able to turn on the TV despite your decrepit state and hear the news. Kim Kardashian’s baby is missing! You care, but not that much, and turn over to go back to sleep when you hear a thud – and a wail. You look down at the foot of the bed and see Kim Kardashian’s baby staring back at you.
Now, you have to piece together the events of the past night to retrace your steps and ultimately deliver Kim’s baby back to her without giving yourself away.
Plot (which the player will piece together – also open to feedback and suggestions!): You and your friends had a Kim Kardashian themes 21st birthday party and all dressed up like a Kardashian. You happen to look a lot like Kourtney, and one of Kim’s friends ushered you from the club to her house, where Kim was holding an launch party for a lightly psychedelic weightloss drug that quickly became rowdy. In the chaos, Kim, tripping on this euphoric Ozempic, hands you her baby, thinking that you are Kourtney. You stumbled home with the baby, completely unaware of the ridiculousness of the situation until you woke up the next morning.
Characters:
- Baby – you wake up, see the news that Kim K’s baby is missing, and realize that the missing photo matches the baby sitting next to you. Throughout the game, you have to bring the baby with you as you piece together your night.
- Influencer baddie – You run into them upon arriving at the club, and have to talk to them to get more information.
- Kim Kardashian – You finally interact with Kim K at her house in all her glory.
Tone:
- Absurd, whimsical, jolly – The dialogue, flavor text upon interacting with objects, and plotline itself are all filled with pop culture references, and are slightly outside the plausibility of everyday life. We want this incongruity to be absurd and funny for the player.
- Mysterious, intriguing, curious – As the player is resolving a mystery, we want the tone of the game to invite them to keep playing. The sense of mystery is key to motivating the player to keep resolving puzzles and to getting them to see the plot through to its conclusion.
Setting: The player travels through 3 ‘settings:’ from a hotel room to a club to a mansion in Los Angeles.
Gameplay: Digital escape room in which the player clicks on objects to learn more about them.
Key Challenges for Design:
- Structuring the game with three separate environments – This includes allowing the user to “uncover” the next space. How will the club and Kardashian’s house remain unknown locations until the user discovers the clues that lead them there? How will they then change locations? Will there be an option to “go to the club” and if so then it becomes a click through game as opposed to an escape room game.
- Making various objects in the room clickable – It will be hard to allow the user to explore the room without making every single irrelevant object clickable. Otherwise the user will know exactly what objects are of interest. To solve this problem we suggested there are around 8 clickable objects in each room, 2 of which are of interest.
Key Challenges for Tech:
- Coding a point-and-click adventure with interactive objects – We envision players navigating each of the three ‘stages’ of the game escape room style. We will need to implement functionality that allows certain objects in the game ‘stage’ to be clickable, and having click actions prompt animated pop ups with important info for the player.
- Creating dynamic dialogue options – We want players to converse with the NPCs they run into along their playthrough. Our most ambitious version of this idea is to have players type in natural language responses, and receive a custom response from the NPC. A simpler version would be implementing dialogue trees that players navigate by clicking on responses from dialogue options, RPG style.
Key Challenges for Art:
- Conveying a sense of hangxiety through the art style – We want to replicate the feeling of disorientation and lack of context that comes with a post-blackout
- Lightly psychedelic – At some point in the game, you accidentally take the psychedelic Ozempic thinking it is an aspirin for your hangover headache. The game’s art style should reflect your perception of your surroundings, with objects melting, pulsating patterns, and a lightly trippy atmosphere.
Who is this for?
We want this game to feel absurd – you are interacting with famous figures and navigating a surreal plotline – but also relatable, in the sense that experiencing hangxiety is a pretty ubiquitous experience for young people. Hence, this game is primarily for young adults who will derive enjoyment from the pop culture references and relatable puzzles in-game.
Individual Post Links
- Julia: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/06/week-5-individual-team-member-deliverables/
- Naima: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/06/naima-patel-checkpoint-1-individual-member/
- Paige: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/06/p2-individual-checkpoint-1-2/
- Parthav: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/06/parthav-shergill-p2-checkpoint-1-individual-contribution/
- Rachel: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/07/p2-concept/
