My sudden inspiration from the Talking Heads song gave me the idea to try and see how I could give the players a story with as simple graphics and visuals as possible. From my experience, models and graphics in a video game have effects well beyond those of visual aesthetics, and the distraction by these things can really hurt a game's intended experience.
Starting the prototype again (almost) from scratch, I used the opportunity to improve the way I used prefabs in Unity3D. Knowing I didn't want to use anything but 3D primitives, this gave me the opportunity to play with the thicknesses of walls and doors, to see which gave the best effect. Hinge joints in Unity3D can be a bit crazy, so I experimented with door thickness until the shape of the door and gaps around the door were behaving (more) nicely with the player model when they pinned a door at an angle that made the hinge start to go crazy. Each prefab included half a hexagon, a light, a spawnpoint transform, and a collider, so they could be fit together easily, with options to control everything by a script.
At this stage I also moved to using the Unity3D standard first person controller script. It's a very flexible and well-made script that ticked all the boxes, but my experiences making my own scripts earlier weren't a waste of time, as they gave me more understanding of how this script worked. The control scheme is basically the standard FPS style with WASD to move and mouse to look, but for the player decisions I wanted to have a non-standard setup. Some people who tested the game wanted control to bet very fast and convenient, with mapping of the decisions to be abstract and not literal, like having left click for yes, right click for no, but a scheme like this would greatly break the experience I wanted. By having the Y key for yes, and the N key for no, at each decision, the player may have to stop for a second and look for the key, an act that may give them time to consider their choice more, and one that directly maps to the yes/no decision. I feel it makes the whole experience of deciding more of a big deal, requiring more conscious effort requiring reflective thought (using Norman's cognitive model). A faster, more behavioural decision would not have the same conscious weight behind it.
At this stage I started to experiment with the lighting of each cell. As I determined earlier, the lighting was an incredibly important part of the experience I wanted, with the uncertainty and atmosphere being very connected to the lighting of the room. In combination with the objects and decisions for the player to interact with, I decided the colour of the lighting should change to help adapt the atmosphere to the player's choices. To keep track of the detail of player choices, and to give myself flexibility for the outcomes of decisions, I created 4 different metrics. I'm going to keep these metrics secret (but they aren't very hard to guess after playing the game). These metrics evolved over time, and the colour of the lights would change, with generally a red colour coming from simply hunting for the good life, and a more green/blue light coming from breaking the rules.
There are other aspects of the lights changing with metrics, but more detail of those would reveal the secrets.
For the objects and events for the player to decide on, I started with the basics from the song; car, house, and wife. The statements that Byrne made often with his wearing of suits of various sizes made comments about the nature of business and work in my opinion, and in line with the subject of the song, it could be assumed that they had a job in some area of business. This gave me the idea to include a job choice in the game. The ‘suit' type jobs I chose in the game were inspired by the song, and my experiences in modern life where the pursuit of the good life results in people wanting these jobs. The other type of jobs offered in the game (no including the designer) were inspired by my research into public opinions about honest jobs with honest people. They are lower paying jobs where someone can still make a living, giving them the opportunity to see the other side of the game. The designer is a special case. From my own experiences in the design world, it's clear to see that there are different motivations behind people in the field. A secret metric from the game actually tries to measure how much the player would care about ethics, and depending on this value, their choice of designer job can have a different end result.
Going by the commonplace situation of people having car loans, I decided to make the players need a job before they could get a car. This assumes a full time job is required to get a car loan to get a car. The next basic object from the song is a house, which I decided would need a home loan. Of course, more and more it seems absolutely impossible to ever get a house without one, so it made sense to include this in the game. To get a home loan, of course a full time job is necessary, so the job again became a prerequisite. Later game testing showed that the home loan needed to be a bit easier to find, as there was only one of it, and as it was necessary for a house, it was just a bit too much of a challenge to find at times. With a car and house included, next was the wife, who I originally thought could change depending on player choice, but after testing, I decided to keep it the same, as this part of the game could be quite subjective. If a player had managed to collect a car, house, and wife, they had satisfied the requirements for the good life, and I decided to make this the win condition.
With basic needs ideated, I started on deciding the other objects. I spent a long time thinking of parts of modern life that combine together to reflect a person's choices and the way they live. Sources of influence like popular culture, health, deep thought, entertainment, travel, environment, and lifestyle became the mix of objects you can see in the game. Each yes or no decision changes the metrics used to measure the players, and I iterated these values throughout the game, considering the ways they influence our lives in relation to the values of the song and the game. Some objects like the plane tickets have completely different values, depending on the earlier decisions of players. A short video of the prototype objects and new lighting.
An important aspect of these choices is the way they influence the decay of the remaining life. Playing the game the ‘right' way makes the life drain quite quickly, adding to the need for more life, and adding to the rush players feel. The way the yes/no decisions affect this give players the room to experiment with their choices. With my goals of letting people find meaning themselves (like with the song), I don't ever make it obvious that choosing to play the ‘wrong' way can actually have a wildly different result, and still let them have a chance of finishing. More about this aspect of the game later.
For the artwork used in the game, I used Pixabay as it has an impressive selection of creative commons 0 pictures. Some other pictures came from fair use edited frames, and my own photos. These images were processed with a slight pixelated effect, to fit the aesthetic style I mentioned earlier, that would not interfere with the intended experience of the game.
Although I'd changed the metaphor of water from that of the song to darkness, I wanted to include water in the game. I wanted the water to rise as the players made the ‘right' choices, to add to the rushed atmosphere, and to bring in the idea of floating in the water like the song talks about. Using (oddly) depreciated shaders from earlier Unity3D builds, I added in a plane of somewhat surreal water that rises and falls depending on player choices.
Initially for the interface I was having ideas that used the water metaphor for life as some kind of indicator of life remaining. I also thought about more obscure ways to show the progress of getting the car/house/wife, but in the end I used a much more simple, text-only interface. My motivations for using text only came from looking deeper into the kind of message I wanted to send about life. A measure of life that was more abstract and artistic would remove the more blunt and visceral emotion attached with a number clearly dropping to 0. The fact that humans being represented by numbers makes up a part of modern life that is famously dehumanising also influenced this decision. It connected with the themes of the song and the game well. For the rest of the interface at this stage, a display of objects the player has picked up worked well as a simple check box. With the idea of someone flowing through life, simply ticking boxes available to them without stepping outside the possibilities of these boxes, the interface would again fit with the themes I wanted.
The last major aspect of this prototype was the doors of the maze and the way they opened. The capsule collider of the player didn't push open the doors in a way that suited my intended experience for how players would see the decision inside. I wanted the decision to come out of the darkness in smoothly as the door opened to at least 90 degrees away from the player, giving the impression that the player model was hiding behind the door somewhat cowardly. To make the experience of opening the door more like a cautious and slow push of the hand, I added a collider to the front of the model that give the right feel.
My process and experience making the new prototype was much less linear and easy to describe than earlier. The complexity of the game's design meant that I tested the interactions in combination, rather than in isolation. From this I got a better impression of the experience on the whole, something I felt was much more appropriate than testing parts in isolation, where the outcomes could be so different depending on context. My goals changed from being just about testing parts of the game to testing the game on the whole. With the move to a more artistic direction, my emotional goals for the game changed to be less about fear and quick draw, to putting across the way the song inspired me to make comments about life.
I didn't want to spoil the game too much, so I sent videos of the prototype to others to get some feedback, and the new parts of the interaction were supported by their comments, like the rushed feeling and panic of the later part of the round. I felt I was getting quite close to reaching a point where I could let others actually play the game through a number of times, to see how it made them feel, and how I could get closer to my purpose of communicating the themes I wanted to get across.
In the course I was tutoring at university around this time, we were taking students through a critical design project, and in a way the game became something of a critical design game, trying to play with perceptions and get a message across. This drastic change in the intended emotional goals of the game meant that the way I went about prototyping it changed too, and it was a really nice experience to iterate on the game this way.
