Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four . — 1984, George Orwell
SUMMARY
The Screen is a short narrative game project for this collaborative unit’s submission, created with Angelina Han from the MA Visual Effects course over the past weeks. The gameplay is roughly ten minutes. In the game, the player originally answers a series of human-verification questions on a 2D screen, then it is later revealed that the screen is just a part of a bigger interactive 3D space.
In this report, I will include the personal objectives, discussion of referenced materials, developments of this project, and some other notable details.
Here is the game, available to download on itch.io.
OBJECTIVES
The objectives of this project combines requirements and suggestions of the collaborative unit and personal aims. These include:
- Create a scene where a player can interact with multiple objects.
- Collaborate and communicate with someone from outside of the current course.
- Get more familiar with 3D game working pipeline in Unity Engine.
- Practicing narrative storytelling in games.
DISCUSSION
At the beginning of the term, there was a WhatsApp group chat providing as a way of networking students from different courses. From that group, I was in collaboration with Angelina, a student from the MA Visual Effects course.
We started our first discussion on 18 January at the school library, where we had consensus that we were both interested in making an interactive project using Unity. Angelina proposed a topic of a surreal adventure of a little girl with short white hair who falls asleep inside a dream on the moon. I proposed a meta game story where the player would, in a series of interacting with objects in the scene, realise that the character understands the presence of this game.
Then on 22 January we laid out the outline of the story:
- First person interactive scene.
- Starts from a computer screen, then the camera gradually zooms out, revealing the whole room from main character’s perspective.
- From following the instructions on the computer screen to interact with objects in the room, the character realises that not everything can be controlled by the character, revealing that this whole experience is just a simulation.
- Main idea: The actual player is playing a character inside a simulation, who realises that (s)he is inside this simulation. Only by not following the simulation’s rules, the player can really have their own thoughts and motivations.
- It helps people to find their agencies over their own actions in life.
RESEARCH
After deciding our topic to do a meta game, I started to organise the ideas of the games I played before. I wanted to create a narrative that requires minimum text and depends on interactive space designing and diegetic storytelling, and the story not being explained thoroughly to the players, letting them to interpret themselves.
Here are some of the games that I researched on:
P. T. (Playable Teaser) (2014)
People have been trying to interpret every aspect of this game for many years. It features a simple corridor that repeats itself indefinitely, and the player is left freely to explore the entire scene with many objects to interact with.
Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist (2015)
In this game, player is asked by a narrator to help prepare a heist game for a previous player before they can actually play the game. There are feedbacks for every object the player clicked on for the whole game. Both The Stanley Parable and this game have a simple UI: a simple white reticle in the centre of the screen.
The Stanley Parable (2011)
The narrator explains the story in the background and tried to guide the silent protagonist to follow his orders to complete the game, but there are many paths to choose from. Based on the player’s decisions, the narrator will comment on the actions the player took. There is an aha moment when the player disobeys the narrator’s order for the first time, this is when the player begins to know the game is starting to break the forth wall, which is something I want to add to our game.
The Cubicle. (2016)
A VR game that has abstract sequences and visualisation of various fractal objects such as the Menger sponge. Sometimes when the player faces one direction, the parts of the scene that are off screen will change. This way of progressing the game is very interesting to me, and I used this technique to help advance the story in our game as well.
PROTOTYPING
Angelina and I work on this project with each of us doing different task. Angelina built the models needed for the game using Maya, and my main works including composite them in Unity and then program for game logics, in addition to game direction and story.
Game Manager
It is the brain of the game. It has references to other controllers, and most important of all, there are buttons that serve as shortcuts of the games in the inspector that makes debugging easier, without requiring replay the whole game from the beginning every time.
Audio Controller
Controls how sounds work in the game. It has public functions that can be referenced by other game objects to instantiate audio sources in real time and automatically destroy them when not needed anymore to save memory.
Monitor Controller
A controller dedicated to the monitor of the laptop component in the game. It contains functions that can be called to switch contents on the laptop.
Effect Controller
Controls the glitch effects. Variables are exposed to be called by other objects and animated in animation clips.
Raycast Controller
A controller that keeps track of the object the player is focusing on with the camera.
Interactable
A class that requires a collider. When the camera is focusing on an interactable object, the player can left click on it, calling an action function. The actual content of the action function is left virtual and can be overdid by inherited classes.
Pick Up (inherits Interactable class)
Pops up the clicked object in front of the player camera: the object enters an inspecting state and then the player can move the mouse to rotate the inspected object, or right click to put the object away.
Rotatable (inherits Interactable class)
Rotates a specified angle when interact with.
Lamp Light(inherits Interactable class)
Can be switched on and off when clicked on. It can show and hide light components, as well as changing a specified mesh’s material to a glowing material when switched on.
Keyboard/Button (inherits Interactable class)
Plays a pressed down animation when clicked on.
Drawer(inherits Interactable class)
Opens or closes when clicked on. Drawers can be used to store other interactable objects.
WALKTHROUGH
The game consists of three segments:
Segment 1
The character is setting up a new operating system and is asked to input their name and answer some questions to verify the user is a real person, and not a robot.
At first the questions are quite simple mathematical problems, then the questions become more philosophical and enigmatic, when some words will flash on the screen in split seconds, warning the character to “get out.” When the character selects the “escape” button on a question, the system crashes and reboots.
Segment 2
After the system reboots, the camera zooms out to a 3D space, revealing that the operating system is running on a laptop in a room. The character then explores the room. A red button is presented on the desk, but it is covered with a lid.
New objects will spawn in specific orders off screen when observing specific items. The lid will finally be removed when a sequence of specific items have been inspected.
Segment 3 & Ending
Upon pressing the button, the window opens and show that there are at least three identical rooms labeled as experiment subjects. The whole room then moves down to a lower level, revealing a vast dark hall.
A large screen floats midair, asking the character more questions. At the end after being forced to reply the statement “2+2=5,” the camera slowly zooms out, showing there is an unnamed observer in a monitoring room, observing at different “test subjects” participated in a same experiment.
CONCLUSION
The narrative in the result of this project is not straightforward, rather it relies on subtle contexts of the scene and objects’ diegetic contexts.
For example, the pictures on the frame changes, showing a wider scope of the world each time, and the questions asked by the system took references from George Orwells works 1984 and Animal Farm. The boarding pass and the end credit’s “special thanks to” section also refer the player by their name directly.
This type of interaction space is something I wanted to creat at the first place, so I think it meets my own expectations, although it can definetely be better.
There are some other details put inside the game, this is an attmpt to tell the story in more than one way. However there is no exact answer to what really happens in the “experiment” conducted in this game, the ending is open, and the rest is left to players to interpret.
The playtest feedbacks were generally positive, of which mostly praised the art direction, sound design, and storytelling. Before playtesting, I was a little bit worried that the story can be too ambiguous. The UI designs and the objects placements had change for a few times, and I think they can be further improved in the future.
Overall I think this is a project that has a great potential, and I am now better at designing 3D games using Unity Engine, and I can build prototypes faster. One thing I think could have done better is the communication between my teammate, Angelina, and I. We did not have many face-to-face discussions and most of our collaboration work was finishing own progress and then send to the other person. This could have be improved to make the collaboration process better.
In the future I intend to polish this game better and share to the public.
