P2 Reflection — To be or not to be

In this project, I created a game that gets players to care more about their true passions and be braver about the things they are willing to fight for. The “winning” stage for this game is when the user chooses to fight the dystopia for their true passion, instead of just staying alive for the things they are not passion about. That is reflected in the title as well, the question of “to be or not to be”. The game was inspired by the society phenomena which is nowadays more and more people are learning computer science not because they are passionate about it, but because of the high paychecks.”

I learned how to make decisions for the right scale. At first, I wanted to write a story about time travel, because I saw a photo of the Forbidden City in China and I was so obsessed with the exotic colors and forms. Then I thought about the dystopia and set the background of the story in 2217. The character has to be executed in order to time travel. Therefore, the initial game I came up with was more like an adventure game, in which players would find some clues if they picked the right leads and discovered the way back to reality.

I was really struggling because it was really hard to describe the settings and the directions, and the story was getting really long. And I had a feeling that the “dystopia setting background” might be more interesting and in the right scale, but I couldn’t make the decision of cutting the current main part of my game. Then I talked with Chris in class. I expressed my concern with the story getting really long and took the emphases away. He advised me to take out the time travel part and focused on the robotic era part. “The baseline was pretty high when you presented the robotic era idea and have players to be executed.” That was the time I learned to give up on some ideas. The ideas that you were really passion about but just was not for the right contexts. These idea feels like the ex who always broke your heart, but you just couldn’t break up with him/her. After being supported to get rid of the time travel part, I felt much relieved, and was able to move on easily and smoothly.

Talking to professors is a good way to be supported. I think talking to friends or classmates about your ideas is nice too, but for these hard decisions, they might be too nice to advise you to get rid of an idea that you were really excited about. Also mapping the frame out in the notebook before inputting them in twine is really helpful. I didn’t do that for the first round and I ended up messing up the options after rounds of iterations. A question that I still don’t have an answer about is whether we should map one story first and come up with other options or create all the options in the same time.