GAME DESIGNER - Technical & Level Designer
Role(s)
Game Designer | Level Designer | Sound Designer | Graphics Designer
Collaborators
2 programmers/designers
Summary
A game based on a challenge given to us by our teachers to create a game within certain constraints.
These constraints were that we had to use the “Six Thinking Hats” brainstorming technique, couldn’t use non-diegetic UI, couldn’t follow any genre conventions or take inspiration from any media and couldn’t have combat.
After some brainstorming, and feeling a bit stressed for time, we arrived at “Essay Writing Simulator”. The idea was to capture the essence of writing an essay under strenuous conditions, while balancing that with wanting to read and check what you have written, and adding a small bit of humour to it.
To achieve our experiential goal, we focused on making the game as stressful as possible, having the walls close in on the player as time ticked away, speeding up the ticking of the clock, introducing heavy breathing and heartbeats as the deadline came closer, and having the edges of the screen darken and close in on you. We also created a random text generator that would create words as the player typed away, having a random string of sentences appear on the screen that were normally somewhat humorous in nature to try and make the player stop to read what was actually written
YEAR & LENGTH
2022 | 1 Week
GENRE
Casual, Psychological, Funny, Stress-inducing
Engine
Unity
Inspiration & Idea
The inspiration for the game came to us as we were approaching the end of our first day on the project. We knew we only had 1 week to work on this and while we were brainstorming and stressing out about what to make, we started joking about how we've written essays for school that were less stressful than making this.
From there, the idea was born. A game about having to write as much as possible in 2 minutes while also resisting or indulging in the urge to check what exactly you're writing, because sometimes while writing, you just write and then check later, realising what you've written is complete gibberish.
We really wanted to make the experience as stressful as possible however, in order to capture the essence of a last minute hand-in. As such, we set out to make just that.
Design
For the overall Level Design, I wanted the room to really evoke the idea of a student living bare-bones in some sort of dorm. Nothing but the absolute necessities.
Because we had the requirement of having to use diegetic UI as well, we decided that the entire level would also be the UI. As such, the desktop, alarm clock, printer and even the posters on the wall would all serve a purpose in what they could tell the player.
For example, while the alarm clock is a very straight forward timer, the walls themselves also serve to act in this role, as the walls close in on the player as time goes on, aiming to evoke a response similar to the claustrophobia that one might feel when stressed and cooped up inside a room.
The posters are there in order to help the player gauge how much the walls have moved, as during playtesting we realised that it was hard to really notice that the walls were closing in.
The printer serves as the player's score, showing how many pages they wrote at the end by actually printing them out.
For the game, we created a random sentence generator that would randomly spit out words whenever a key was pressed on the player's physical keyboard, that would then try to follow a basic sentence structure to populate the in-game computer screen so that the player had a visualisation of what they were writing
In order to psych and stress the player out , we went for a variety of different overlapping effects to get the feeling down.
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As time goes on the ticking of the clock becomes faster, even though the clock maintains a consistent tick rate.
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The walls of the level close in on the player.
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The edges of the screen start to darken and envelop the player, reducing their vision to give them a tunnel vision effect.
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A heartbeat starts up, and progressively gets faster and faster as time goes on.
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The in-game player starts breathing more and more heavily as the timer approaches the end.
Final Thoughts
The game was immensely fun to make and we had a good laugh doing it.
I enjoyed being able to mess around with making some of the sound effects, and sourcing some of the others that we didn't make, finding the experience to be informative and enlightening in how one can go about creating some of these effects.
The chance to try modelling as well was pretty fun, and while what I made was incredibly basic, helped to better understand a bit of what that creation pipeline entails.
This was also a great exercise in trying to really think about constraints given and how to work with them, as well as a great opportunity to figure out different ways to convey information to a player without simply telling them through standard UI.