Project Two: Together Alone
Team: Xiaohai Liu, Suyie Z., Eli Vazquez, Yawen S., Yinchen Xu, and Ty Hunter
Artist’s Statement
Urban life has always been complicated. While enjoying the convenience that urban life affords, individuals can and are usually frustrated with the crowded and rushing pace of life. Cities make it possible for people to meet others with similar ideas, similar jobs, and similar lifestyles, but they do not necessarily create more opportunities to make real friends. We feel the struggles ourselves more or less and intend to present such conflicts in urban lives. We try to explore such conflicts through our game of narrative and exploration, Together Alone. Players are expected to feel the initial alienation from the environment, arriving as a new citizen in a metropolis, trying to adjust to the new life.
In Together Alone, players will get off the metro in a busy city. The players will navigate through different environments and interact and communicate with others in the city. Sometimes, players are mere observers, witnessing stories happening in the city, about working, studying, identities, values, and ideas. Other times, players have to take a more active role and make critical decisions that would affect themselves; this provides more opportunities for players to introspect their own values.
We invite players to explore the city as well as themselves.
Initial decisions about formal elements and values of the game
We want our game to walk our player through the emotional journey from alienation towards togetherness. We want to have a linear story in this walk simulator game so that we can control and polish the environment the player would be experiencing. We decided to use colors to contrast feelings of loneliness and togetherness and show the progression of the game. We also intended to use colors to contrast the protagonist and the environment. We were going to make use of zooming to manipulate emotions, but due to restraints of the scope, we ended up using multiple fixed cameras to view the scenes.
The initial story we decided on was a person moving from being stifled in the crowd, deciding to leave the crowd, and eventually finding their own crowd. Our game would start with the player coming to a city for the first time and needing to go back to the apartment. However, because there are too many people, it’s hard to move the character. With more and more people coming in squishing, it becomes impossible for the player to navigate. Therefore, the player needs to take an alternative route, an empty alley. Then the story unfolds as the character starts to feel lonely and powerless in this dark strange alley, in a strange and seemingly apathetic city…
Concept Map
Testing and Iteration History
Our playtest is for the early stages of the game. Getting off at the metro station after work, the player will have to navigate through crowds of people and make their way to the outdoor square and back to their apartment.
Narrative Prototype
The link to our prototype can be found here.
Our first prototype is a narrative prototype made on Twine. We used text to describe the environment and allowed players to choose among different actions to proceed. We wanted to know whether players will feel loneliness from being in a crowd in a big city.
Three playtests were conducted during the class with Autumn, Michelle, and Ankit. Overall, playtesters enjoyed our game pretty much. Although the prototype was simple and only with words, it was very visual. Playtesters could pick up the transition of emotions we tried to convey, such as nervousness at the beginning when navigating through the crowd and more relaxed after reaching the destination. Also, playtestes enjoyed unclear goals and were engaged in the game: they were curious about whether their choices would lead to different endings.
However, all playtesters felt significantly more anxious than we anticipated instead of loneliness. One playtester felt that being knocked off and getting up and getting going sounded kind of sad. Another playtester thought wrong decisions could lead to death. One playtester mentioned that they did not feel empathetic with the character since they were just going through the flow without thinking about the story. We hoped when we built this game in Unity, these could be mitigated by familiar scenes of the city and drawing of the characters.
Second Playtests
For the second round of playtests, we had our playtesters play the game on their computer while screen sharing with us on zoom and we collected 10+ playtests from our peers in the class. This way, we are able to observe our playtesters directly and identify problems they encounter in our game.
Overall, our playtesters are impressed with the construction of the gaming environment and are curious about the protagonist’s story which is what we intended for. In the following section, I would list issues we identified common amongst all playtesting and require fixes and the corresponding fix we implemented:
Problem 1: Players don’t know where to go in the first place and do not know whether to use the keyboard or the mouse. Fix: Make the camera move along with the player. Also adjust the camera angle, to show more of the ramps in the first scene to guide the player where to go at the beginning of the game. We also added instructions on how to move the character.
Problem 2: Players feel the lack of purpose, they are not sure about the objective of the game. Fix: add text messages addressing the player at the beginning of the game to let them know that they have to move to a specific location.
Problem 3: Players feel that the NPC pedestrians are machines instead of humans, possibly because they cannot interact with the NPCs. Fix: we added dialogues the NPCs can have when being approached by the player to create a sense of interaction.
Problem 4: Players find the protagonist moving too slowly. Fix: Add a running function.
Problem 5: at the scene where the player needs to purchase a metro ticket, there is no clear indication that a ticket is purchased. Fix: add sound effect to indicate the success purchase.
In addition to the fixes implemented because of problems we identified, we implemented additional features to improve the experience of our game:
- We added sounds effects including: Ambient sound for the metro level, the ground level, Pedestrians’ mumbling, metro gate sound effects (if the player didn’t buy the ticket — simply alarm; if bought the ticket — “ding”), and the text message notification sound from the landlord.
- We added language that can’t be read by the player, spoken by NPCs to increase the sense of alienation while creating the illusion of interactions.
- We added more sprites for NPCs to enrich the existing scenes we have.
- We added an alley scene and a lobby scene to push the storyline forward.
- We added an indication for the end of the game.
Game
The link to our game builds (Mac & Windows) can be found here.
Watch our Demo video:
