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[Released] Awkwardness and Harmony

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"Akwardness and Harmony"

A score capturing arcade where you traverse a map of :) happy faced and :angry: sad faced characters.

 

It is inspired by empathy games such as Jay Tholen's "Dropsy," "Everything is going to be OK" by Alienmelon, and the sword fighting sequences in "Secret of Monkey Island." It is loosely following the theory of Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM). More on that at the end.

 

Game Design: 

The player and NPC's are all governed by an internal mood meter that ranges from :) happy to :angry: sad, with potentially 1 to 5 states of intermediate states, neutral in the middle and lesser extremes of happy and sad. 

 

PC and NPCs all share one basic interaction verb, Speaking. Any two NPC's will automatically Speak to each other when they pass by each other. Speaking will modify the mood meter of the two (or more?) adjacent characters.

:) Happy characters will increase the mood of a sad character. Sad character will increase the mood of a happy character. Neutral characters will have no effect. The player can also speak but be deliberate about when speaking.

 

There would be different personality styles for different characters. This would effect how those characters mood meters automatically change over time, and how a character responds to speaking. Different personalty styles would be things such as Optimist, Pessimist, Introvert, Extrovert, or some combination there of. Optimists would have naturally growing moods, Pessimists would have naturally decaying moods. Extroverts would respond well to speaking, but Introverts would have a cool down period where speaking too much actually decreases their mood.

 

 

Scoring:

The game will be in rounds have a time limit and a score system. player can collect points by speaking to happy characters. No points are collected or deducted for speaking to neutral or sad characters, the idea is to enforce the player's happiness through seeking out happy faces and communication.

 

Difficulty modes and level design:

The game would have several difficulty modes. These modes are where the character plays the game in the different personality styles.


Technical and scope goals:

This will be made in Game Maker 2. I've done a few tutorials that should help me get this amount of stuff done, character movement, interaction. I'm a complete novice so I'll probably end up with less that my basic scope goals for the jam.

 

Basic scope:

Move player around, speak with people. People stop when speaking. NPCs speak to each other automatically. NPCs do not speak to player. Get points, end time limit. Basic character art with simple color shifting to differentiate stuff. Simple animation cause I can't help myself

 

Intermediate scope:

Personality types for NPCs. more art, animation for environments and maybe different characters. Several Levels / Scenarios.

 

Advanced scope:

Playable personality types for player. Flavor text reactions. Saved local score board for different modes / levels / scenarios.

 

Concept basis:
Cognitive Behavorial Modification (CBM) involves software that feature a grid of frowning and smiling people, and you click on the smiling people as fast as possible in a limited amount of time. The concept is that a depressed or anxious person perceives threats in their environment, in the form of frowning people. By rewarding the user to increase their awareness of happy people in the environment, it is said that the user's outlook on life will become more optimistic.  The CBM games I've toyed are dead simple, and I already see an improvement in my outlook on life having used them a little bit. Perhaps only by placebo effect of meditating on the idea, but placebo effects are real effects, self fulfilling prophecies and all.

 

Ludo-narrative Problems:

The trick with making a CBM style game is to ensure the game itself enhances the player's positive mood state, and does not actually cause a demoralizing effect in the player, via too much competition, or other strange social implications. In a way many games are already CBM modules, but focus on mood reduction, punishing world of frowning people. The design as I have above described has a potentially problematic implication, that the player is a sort of care taking cheer leader of the NPCs, and by having the player character running around trying to cheer people up, that could be an actually very annoying thing to certain people in real life. My hope is that the personality system could create an empathetic effect giving people space to feel the emotion they need to feel. One solution to help this dissonance could be flavor text bubbles that say things like "I feel better getting that off my chest" and such, to enforce that the happy faces are not literally happy and sad states, but are rather a reflection of a satisfaction state.

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Thanks @hedgefield !

 

I've been mulling over this and considering the careful balance of keeping the game simple, yet still convey the empathy and also bias modification premise.

 

I'm considering rewarding points for all player to NPC interactions, but on a scaling reward. 2 points for the least happy states, 10 points for interacting w very happy states.

 

I'm also considering maybe adding a secondary "chores" system for the PC and NPCs to perform. The NPCs simply move back and forth flipping switches that represent chores and tick up a chore counter. Maybe happy characters move slightly faster, which means chores get completed. But chores also reduce their mood. Then the timed session round uses chores completed multiplied by PC's score to get the session score.

 

That's already again way out of scope for me. I'll just end up cobbling together whatever the heck i can in Game Maker and see what happens. 

 

I'm so excited to start this project, I find it hard not to cheat and start production before the official start date. Patiently toiling in the brain storming pre-production world is legit and productive.

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Dev update:

 

Started building stuff up in Gamemaker. Just super basics, getting player input and a character moving, making the start menu system.

 

I really appreciate that scratch.mit.edu platform as a dead simple practice in programming. Using it you can still applying a style of OOP and set up variables to eliminate magic numbers. In addition to getting comfortable with the basic power of looping statements without getting mired in syntax errors.

 

I have also recently been very inspired by the Herman Brain Dominance Instrument, a business personality test that uses the metaphor of lateralized brain assert that people have certain thinking styles, lending them to certain world views and preferences toward labor power. It's a dialectical approach that I think is a good empathetic tool. I can apply this into the game to compliment the previously mentioned introvert / extrovert / optimist / pessimist system. Basically making a DnD style stats system just for personalities.

 

That said I am trying to boil scope back down to something simple. And try to play to my strength of art and animation. Creating basic characters and just one level.

 

I have also been brainstorming how to incorporate a handshake vs fistbump mini-game, as a direct reference to the "Awkwardness and Harmony" podcast title source.

 

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I'm managing to build things outside of tutorials and have them work together. This is fantastic.

 

Managed to get my initialization and globals stuff set up and consolidate pause function stuff into the init global object.

 

Currently trying to attach a head to a body and get it all to draw. Then I can change the head sprite to display the emotion states, and use that for all the game characters.

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I've reached that discouraging wall whenever I attempt a programming project where I have no idea how to move forward with what and in the process of floundering for progress I end up accidentally breaking everything and turning it to mud. It probably means more careful reading of tutorials and such.

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This sounds really interesting, hope you'll be able to overcome the programming hurdles.

If you want some help, you could join the #wizardjam slack channel, it's pretty active during the jam.

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I shall enter the slack. Thanks!

 

I'm elated to announce that I trouble shot my way out of my animation issue. I can't recall what I did exactly but I did learn the value of commenting code to isolate the problem.

 

I might even be in a position to begin introducing NPCs to interact with. I am so totally stoked.

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I love games that model very complex interactions between objects, because the concepts become clear very quickly and leave room for exploration. I will second @Zirrrus above. A lot of smart people are hanging out in #wizardjam slack and have helped me with countless programming dilemmas. 

 

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Thanks @theschap! I feel a bit of a pretentious imposture, nice I have zero programming skill. But it's always been a dream of mine to make weird social games

 

I'm currently breaking full screen stuff and trying to use the git repo to revert to a good state. But it seems to be behaving weird inside GM2's Source Control notes now.

 

Once that's settled I'm going to try and add some NPCs and finally get to the seitan of this project

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The attached screenshot represents a marvelous new milestone. 

 

The introduction of the first NPC, "Abby." Currently she is capable of walking to the left, colliding with the player and the wall, with working walk and face animation.

 

I also learned some finer points of Git through GM2, such as that using BASH instead of it will confuse it very badly. Also, Git confuses me very badly. But I'm grateful for its utility.

aah02.jpg

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Here it is, Version 0.0.1!

https://stiegr.itch.io/awkwardness-and-harmony

 

I've learned a lot about Gamemaker, and myself, in the process of this Jam. As usual, I perform best at the 11th hour, which is to say I won't work on a project until I know it's absolutely due. And then I'll complain about the lack of time and petition to extend the deadline, this is a life long issue. I spent most of my early parts of the main time line getting comfortable applying the few tutorials of Gamemaker I know into one project, and setting up a version control repository. Trying to expand my skills in the code, which is a frustrating endeavor for myself, so it was punctuated with long naps and distractions and life chores. At the 11th hour I decided to finally make all the other art assets, and this was something I probably should just start with next time, once I start pouring assets into the beast things get really exciting.

 

I intend to update this with content and, who knows, maybe even game systems that meet the goals of the initial guideline.

 

Good times,

-Stieg R

 

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Nice work Stieg! I could definitely tell the emotions apart in your art, though I wasn't sure what effect my speaking was having on the NPCs. Thanks for the devlog!

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Thanks!

 

The speaking has very limited and unpredictable effects on the NPC behavior at the moment. Basically it's something like one speech bubble causes a +2 tick in mood, and the NPC's colliding with their invisible walls causes them to get a -1 tick in mood. But when the player speaks, it can tick the NPC mood past the top value and flip back to the bottom value. Its extremely broken!

 

I've been trying to refactor everything to be more modular so i can introduce more NPC's with ease. Instead of making more NPCs and content. So it's a bit of a bummer to release the game for the WizJam in such a raw and sort of broken state. But I'm learning so much and hope to get more going and I justified it by thinking hey, mainstream games are constantly released in broken states, so why not just appeal to that precedent?

 

Right now I'm amused that my attempts at refactoring code, the characters are doing weird things such as the cat getting pissed and clipping through the left wall and out of the screen.

 

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Having MS Paint-esque characters be animated is such a good look! As for the gameplay, I liked the concept of affecting mood by speaking to NPCs. I wasn't always quite sure why the moods changed they way they did, though. I would probably have understood it better if I had played some more, but maybe there is a way to visualize the interaction/transaction more clearly.

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