Synopsis
A chick falls off a truck in the center of the city, leaving its family behind, and is tasked to embark on a journey home. On the way, it makes new friends in unlikely places—a caterpillar, plastic bag, and kitten—who all have dreams of flying. Working their way to the nearest rural area, the ragtag group traverses a city with its own industrial and social problems. Together, they try to reach their own versions of home while defining their own meanings of friendship.
This platformer’s gameplay is discovery/walking sim divided by mini games/puzzles. The idea is for players to empathize with characters they have never empathized with before and discern their own lessons from idiosyncratic experiences.
Characters
Chick (main character)
- Very naive and unknowing of the world
- Gullible
- Extremely caring – wins other characters over with caring nature
Caterpillar
- Hyper and excitable.
- More reckless and ditzy than chick, otherwise similarly gullible and naive (they are both literally kids)
- Bonds with chick over desire to fly
Trash Bag
- Inanimate object which the others have accepted as a living friend, only says “…”
- Has the power of flight but only when wind is present
- From chick and caterpillar pov… seems to hold wisdom / lead them places
Kitten
- Fake tough/jaded personality that goes largely ignored by the more excitable characters
- Quickly has a soft spot for the others… feels bound to protect them because they’re so small
- Has a sense of knowing of the terrors of world + street smarts in contrast to the chick and caterpillar
Settings (in order)
Truck
- Interactive room
- Has a picture of the farm
- Has other chickens to talk to
- Has a few nests
- After all items are explored the game cues to the event of this level: theres a bump and the chick falls out of the truck
Citycenter – Daytime
- The chick lands on the sidewalk next to some crumbs…. Follows some pigeons flying above into the park right next to the sidewalk (introducing to player chick’s love of flight). (could also have to cross the road crossy road style)
- Once on the grass, chick begins pecking things, eventually pecking the worm
- Worm and bird meet a butterfly which tells them to look for someone/something who is also looking for home
Party District
- Chick and Worm walk out of the park into a more populated part of town and leave to a dumpster
- At the dumpster they meet trash bag with a HOME depot label on it, which begins rolling in the breeze
- Chick and worm follow it into the party district of the town
- Possibly have a dance break
Industrial Place
- Chick, worm, and bag wind up in a more abandoned part of town.. There are factories everywhere
- They hide in some box or crevice and the cat appears behind them as it is totally the cat’s house
- After some dialogue they are chased out of the area and become friends afterwards…
- Cat knows where the highway is but they must now find a way to traverse it….possibly must walk back through earlier locations to find what they need.
The Highway
- I think a cutscene at most is needed here but something to show the distance they travel on the highway
The Farm
- The farmhouse and coop are explorable
- There is also a truck and tractor and some other farm things
- Must stage an escape using tools and items around
Tone/Mood
In our moodboards, our team agreed on an overall feeling of calm and relaxed gameplay. We highlighted games like Stardew Valley, Spiritfarer, Animal Crossing which used both their premise and their overall art style to lend to this mood. While the narrative itself does carry lessons, the player is able to enjoy the game even if they do not leave with the particular lesson, as we intend for the game to be lighthearted, whimsical, and fun to both play and look at. The previously mentioned games are all animated – Animal Crossing achieves a lighthearted, whimsical feel through its cartoony characters and their distinct personalities (something that we intend on replicating with the design of our characters).
Gameplay
The core gameplay of this experience involves interactive narrative and platformer game mechanics. Players will progress through the narrative as they move and jump through their 2D environment. Different scenes of this game will involve different interactive elements that help engage the player with our narrative and the environment they are immersed in:
Dialogue with Other Characters: Throughout the game, the player, acting as our main protagonist in the story, will have the opportunity to talk to other main and side characters in the environment. This dialogue will be triggered either automatically as they approach characters or by clicking on them. After reading dialogue from another character, we aim for players to be able to pick how they choose to respond by selecting one of several pre-written replies. This will help the player shape the personality of the protagonist and contribute to an emergent narrative regarding the nature of the relationships between characters.
Exploring Environmental Cues: In our opening scene, where our chick protagonist is inside of the truck, we aim to allow players to be able to explore the truck to find cues that clue them into the background of this narrative. Through walking around the truck, looking at different items, and talking to non-playable characters, this exploration will give players a better sense of who they are and how they are “supposed” to be going to the farm. This will enhance the player’s sense of the chick’s motivation to return to the farm once they fall out of the truck.
Minigames: As the player progresses through the game and meets new characters, we aim to include minigames that help facilitate the story and develop relationships between characters. Some games we currently have in mind are as follows:
Tug of War Game
When our chick first meets the caterpillar, it will be a tug-of-war game where they fight over some object. Through, perhaps a time-based mechanic, the player must try to pull the object away from the caterpillar. This introduction parallels the dynamic in this game where both the chick and the caterpillar have similar desires, but are a bit naive. In this minigame, the thing they both desire is the object at the center of the tug-of-war. In the overarching narrative, it is both of their desires to fly.
Flight Game
Around the mid-way point in the game, the chick and the caterpillar will fly through the city through riding on top of a plastic bag. This mini-game will involve some sort of navigation through the air. While we are still sorting out the exact mechanics of this game, especially as it relates to the logic of our developing world, we take inspiration from games such as Tiny Wings, Flappy Bird, and Club Penguin’s Jet Pack Adventure.
Chick Crossing the Road Game
Another game we are considering is a game where the player must navigate the chick across a street to get to the other side (get it?). Players must avoid obstacles as theyattempt to cross the road.
Currency and Collectibles: We are also considering injecting some kind of in-game currency and/or collectibles that allow players to keep track of how “well” they do during a playthrough of the game. This will allow us to enhance the replay value of our game, as some players (depending on their player type) may choose to replay the game to maximize their currency or collectibles on an additional run. While we are still fleshing out what this looks like, we are considering rewarding players currency based on how well they do during mini-games, creating an in-game shop, or allowing players to find collectibles through the scenes they are walking through.
Audience
Our game is intended for young adults but also can be played by anyone who enjoys a digital game. The story at a foundational standpoint is pretty simple, and we intend for the mechanics to be easy to learn as well. The reason the game is intended primarily for young adults is in the embedded lessons that come from character development in the narrative. These are lessons that can feel especially impactful for young adults, in their messages of growing up and finding a sense of family in the people around. The game is inspired by other games like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley which can be played by children and adults.
Key Challenges for Design
Below are a list of challenges we anticipate for designing our game. We hope to overcome these challenges through iterative design based on feedback gained through playtesting sessions.
Minigame Design: With each game comes the decision of how difficult it should be for players to win and the extent to which we would like to penalize players for failing. There is a trade-off here in that games that are too easy may feel boring to the player whereas games that are too intense may pose as a barrier for players to progress through the story. Finding the “sweet spot” of minigame difficulty might pose as a design challenge, as we aim to (1) optimize a player’s sense of flow and (2) mitigate boredom and over-frustration.
Designing for Stakes and Feedback: One way to enhance a player’s investment involves the use of stakes and progression. Designing a game that does not fall flat is a design challenge. To ensure that players feel motivated to finish the game, we will want to consider how to incorporate stakes into the game as well as how to provide feedback on players’ gameplay and progress. This involves making decision surrounding which elements should be used to help increase the stakes (e.g., narrative, minigames, world design, music, etc.). Furthermore, we must consider whether progress on feedback should be punitive or additive to the player’s experience.
Showing vs Telling – Narrative Design: As a highly narrative-driven game, we will need to consider striking a balance between the extent to which we show versus tell our story in the game. In other words, telling the story through dialogue alone seems laborious to the player andremoves their agency in unraveling the narrative. As a result, we will want to consider ways to incorporate narrative into the game without relying exclusively on dialogue. One way we are considering incorporating environmental cues that clue players into the story, the motivations of the character, and setting that the narrative takes place in. It will be important during playtesting sessions to continue to evaluate how well playtesters understand the narrative.
Key Challenges for Tech
Limited Game Engine Experience: For many of our team members, this will be our first experience building a game using a game engine. As a result, we anticipate a learning curve involved in the process of using our game engine and that incorporating all of the details in our initial plan might not be feasible. As a result, we will continue having discussions on the “must-haves” and “would like to have” elements of the game as we work towards crafting our MVP.
Scripting: Our game involves multiple layers of mechanics, especially when considering the mechanics needed to accomplish each mini-game. As a result, there will be some challenge involved in figuring out how to script each type of mechanic used throughout the game. We aim to overcomethrough strategically selecting a game engine that best caters to our core mechanics, alongside using documentation and video tutorials to figure out how to accomplish our scripting goals.
Key Challenges for Art
The key challenges for art come in 1. Creating a wide variety of parallax backgrounds with as limited an asset set as possible and 2. Creating appealing character art of a standardized but minimal style.
In many platformer video games, like Super Mario or Sonic, the items near the player will move much faster than the background, creating what’s called a parallax effect that gives the effect of foreground-background dimension during movement. This is the best way of making immersive backgrounds for our game with very little time. However, given we want to travel through all kinds of places, we’ll need to standardize trees, buildings, signs, doors, tables, and more. And given the setting becomes increasingly rural, we don’t get to sit with any of those assets the whole game. Therefore, the problem will be solved by compromising on quality to complete the MVP and give some effect of parallax scrolling.
We are pretty ambitious about this game, and when it comes to the character art, we need several angles of each character as well as more detailed close-ups. This is a ton of art, and when it comes time to likely have to delegate that work load, some kind of standard will have to be enforced. Art standards are unusual to set because they are quite subjective. The solution will likely be a generally unified effort on art (1-2 people working on it) and lots of inspo boards to standardize style.
Appendix
Dia: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/05/cp1-individual-checkin-team-1/
Atman: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/08/atman-individual-concept-doc/
Cyan: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/08/p2-checkpoint-1-individual-deliverable-cyan/
Anna: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2024/05/05/project-2-checkpoint-1-individual-work-team-1/
