This is the first assignment I’ll put on my blog
We were given an assignment to create/describe an ”Impending Doom” game. The term Impending Doom means, at least in this case, a situation where the feeling or sense of something bad – failure – is about to happen. In short, it’s a game where the player cannot win. While the player may not win, he or she may stall. So while you cannot win, you can stall the failure. In the end, you’ll probably fail anyway.
The format of the assignment was very free, we just had to describe our game in one way or another. I chose to go with the MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) Framework for explaining my game as it, in my opinion, covered the necessary bits and I could split the text up in three simple-to-read paragraphs.
Aesthetics is the emotional response and experience I wanted the players to feel. For my game, it was challenge and anger. Challenge is something which most people enjoy in games, whether it’s overly so or not much at all. Anger might seem like a odd choice for something you want your players to feel, but when it comes down to it, the game is about the player failing anyway. As I see it, anger has two psychological responses for players in video games. The first group of players who get angry with a game, will simply stop playing. The other group will try harder and harder until they perform better. As for the setting of the game, you are a person sitting on a chair. In front of you, there is a table. On that table, there is a sack of coins, a candle and a scroll. The candle is lit so that you can see what’s on your table, but not much around you. In fact, the surrounding area is covered in darkness and a floor made out of bricks of stone. I chose to go with a first-person camera because it is simply the best for games where player precision is key, as you will see later, is fundamental for my game.
Mechanics are the rules and components which makes up a game. There is an ever-present core loop for this game where the player holds down the mousebutton and the reward is picking up coins. This might seem dull, but bear with me. The player guides the avatar’s hand with the mouse. The player then picks up coins from the sack and guides the hand back with the coin to a place on the table where the player stacks them. Stacking is the challenge. When the game starts, a voice in the background tells you how many coins you need to stack, which is then visualized on the scroll. It could be 10 to start with. You then stack 10 coins ontop of eachother (the game will not recognize it if you try to cheat by dividing it up in different stacks – it can only be one stack on the table that earns the player points!). Once the player has reached the goal of X coins, you are handed another assignment of more coins to stack, and this process continues indefinitely. To make things harder, the game is built on a physics engine so that coins may fall and collapse, either from the player’s inappropriate stacking abilities, the player’s incompetens of shoving his hand through the stacks, or third element which is a randomly slammed door in the background which causes your table to tremble. If this randomly slammed door does not anger player’s then I do not know what will, if not their own incompetens. The candle on the table acts as a time limit, as it becomes smaller and smaller as the game goes on. When the candle is burned out, the player loses sight as everything now is dark, rendering the process of coin stacking rather difficult. This candle should if anything add time pressure to the player.
Dynamics are what fulfills the game’s aesthetic goals. The player picks up one coin at a time from the sack, moving them from the sack to a free space on the table where the player stacks them. This is probable player behaviour because by stacking coins, the player progresses – it is an incentive.
Aaand that was my idea for an Impending Doom game. In retroperspective, I can only reconsider one thing and that is the randomly slammed door. I ask myself, is it really necessary?
polishcomposer 