Week 1: Introduction

If you’re reading this, hi! My name is Cindy Lu (not to be confused with the other Cindy in our grade, or any other Cindy in this school, because there are quite a few of them, I would know), and this is my introductory post for my senior project.

What Is This Project About?

My project title is “The Connections Between Engagement and In-Game Endings.” Basically, I’ll be reviewing several video games, both some that feature differing endings based on player decision, and some that do not. Using my own experience of these games combined with reviews from other sources, such as video essays and game review websites, I will be scoring each game on a scale of 1 to 3. For games with multiple endings, 1 means that the ability to change the ending negatively impacted the game, 2 means there was no impact from the endings, and 3 means there was a positive impact instead. For games without multiple endings, 1 means that the game was improved by the lack of endings, 2 means there was no impact from the lack of endings, and 3 means the game could have been improved by including differing endings. I would have formatted this better if I could, but this blog doesn’t let me insert tables or images so… But essentially, it boils down to 1 = different endings bad, 2 = no impact, and 3 = different endings good.

In the end, using these results, I will be working with Isabelle Eriksson to create a short game demo of a pixel art psychological horror game. I’ll be writing the overall storyline as well as every piece of dialogue, while Isabelle is in charge of the art. The overall game follows our protagonist as she ventures through her own dream-like world in order to uncover her past journal entries, which will uncover more about her past and her troubles. She also meets monsters along the way that serve as representations of her own struggles. Based on how she interacts with them, the ending of the game will change. Of course, the short game demo product will not include the differing endings quite yet, but some signs of them will be evident based on character interactions.

If you’d like to learn more about the art section of project, please head over to Isabelle’s introductory blog post!

But Why?

I like writing, and I like video games. That’s the most simple answer to this question. But let’s go into a bit more detail about that.

I’m a writer for this school’s Journalism Club (and this is a shameless advert for it, please go read our physical publications and check out our website!). More specifically, I’m also the section editor for the Bunion, which is our satire column, and so what I do is basically story writing. I enjoy reading stories in general, but I am a big fan of story-rich video games. Very specifically, psychological story games exploring a character’s dream world are probably my favorite subgenre of these. Combined with Isabelle’s love for horror and monsters, and there’s our senior project game idea.

Video games are an incredible medium for storytelling that a lot of people seem to not really consider. I intend to use this project as a way to call attention to this. The research section of this project will help indie developers in their development of story-rich games. Ultimately, based on the scoring system explained above, it will become clear whether consumers believe the inclusion of multiple endings will improve or harm the emotional impact provided by these games. And since the story and thus emotional impact is such a fundamentally important part of the story-rich game market, we can gauge what kind of games can end up standing out from a very saturated game market. As such, an indie developer could use the results of this research to aid in the direction of their story, and hopefully earn more profit in a very competitive industry.

Inspiration (An Excuse to Ramble)

The game that offered me the most inspiration for this project is… believe it or not, a short one-hour long mobile game that I’m sure no one knows about. GenEi AP: Empty Heart is a short pixel art game that follows the protagonist, Mikage, as she searches for music discs to offer to her friend Spica, who is searching for a certain song. You navigate Mikage’s dream-like world in search for discs to offer to the many ghosts of Spica present throughout the game, and short cutscenes that offer glimpses into what Mikage’s life and interactions with Spica are like. Discs can be obtained by exploring certain locations or completely certain tasks, which is something that our game intends to take inspiration from.

This game only offers one ending, and I would have put this on my list of games to review if I could, but there aren’t enough reviews of it for me to use. If you’re wondering how Isabelle and I found such a niche little game, the story and songs present in the game are based on the works of Vocaloid producer Harumaki Gohan, whose music we are both big fans of. If I tried to explain what a Vocaloid was, this blog would go completely off topic for several long paragraphs, so if you’re curious about that, go search it up in your own time. I completely encourage it, by the way.

The other game that comes to mind when talking about inspiration is OMORI, which is a not-so-short pixel art game that follows a lot more triggering topics than GenEi does. It’ll be one of the games I will be reviewing for my research segment. Specifically, there’s the “hikikomori” route (meaning “shut-in” in Japanese), which is a big deviation from the playthrough present in the rest of the routes. It includes a lot of content that can only be seen in this route, and at the same time drops a lot of content that is present in every other route. And it’s all based on one decision made very early on. It’s something that will be interesting to focus on for my research.

Progress This Week

The first week of senior project work was last week which… I was getting dragged around at Disneyland for half of. Whoops? But I spent the rest of the week staring a hole into my laptop as Unity refused to cooperate with me on anything.

We spent this first week working on the basic framework of the game, just so we would have at least something to present at the end of our project. As such, Isabelle and I have been working through Unity to have a basic functional prototype of our game. So far, we’ve implemented player movement and animation, camera movement, and scene transitions. We also got a GitHub repository set up in order to share our work. Most of my time has been spent… learning how Unity functions, since Isabelle has used Unity before and I have not. Coding is hard.

There have been some struggles along the way, but most of them have been resolved already. For instance, I spent a while struggling to implement player animations because certain buttons on the Unity animation tab were greyed out for unknown reasons. However, we found a resolution to that and now player idle and movement animations are working as intended. We’ve been using premade assets for now, and will be replacing them with our actual assets once Isabelle has completed her own research section of the project.

Up Next

We’re going to continue working on getting a working prototype of our game before we begin our research the week after. Some parts we have left to implement are a menu and save file system, as well as object interaction and a dialogue system. Some of this may be left for after we complete our research, though, as we are unsure of how long things like a save file system will take to fully implement.

Come back next week to see even more complaining about Unity!