As our final six-week assignment for George Johnson’s Visual Story class, our task was to create a game that explored aspects of journey, transition, and character development through an interactive game or film experience.
We were asked to consider the mythical tale of Charon and his boat traveling down the River Styx, transporting dead souls who may or may not interact with one another. But its main tenants included the following:
“The specific challenge for this exercise is developing strong characters.”
The idea was that the more the user explores the game space or environment, the stronger any sense of the personality of one or more characters becomes. Also from the assignment instructions:
“The nature of the player should be addressed and made clear within the project.”
As with most of this course, we were also working to understand implicit vs. explicit narrative and what role these types of communication have when storytelling becomes interactive. As before, we were free to choose our own teams, and the seven guys on board were all eager to bring their unique skills together.
My Role
I was a co-producer on the Managotchi team, working primarily on both creating original sound clips and acquiring Creative Commons audio assets, on assisting with principal photography, on assisting with game design, and on online documentation. I did this by publishing a site for us at Managotchi.Wordpress.com, creating art assets for it, and updating it on a weekly basis, running through our progress, challenges and successes.
What I Learned
Managotchi was a really interesting experience for all of us, and the one big lesson I took away from it was that it’s hard to find success without all members buying into the same vision.
Over the seven-week production cycle, we worked through so many iterations of the project, with different names and game engines and narratives, mainly because not everyone on the team would buy in to any given idea. And it was tough given how open the project was to interpretation – one week we thought we were working on a first-person shooter using Unreal Engine, the next, we were working on a strategy art game using C++.
We took inspiration from art games such as The Passage, Execution, Flower and The Marriage for wanting to create something unique. Ultimately, with three weeks to go we realized we had to make a decision, and the idea to spoof the popular 90’s toy Tamagotchi with a simple Flash interface came up.
Despite having to abandon 3D art assets and long strings of code, it was the first idea everyone was thrilled about, and we worked 12 to 15-hour days from then on to create a game that was both fun to work on and fun to play.
Play the Game
The game is 10MB, so it’s easiest to download from here (courtesy of team mate Jordan Braun), where it will open in a new window/tab.
Nick Lewis, Jordan Braun, Ryan Klesc, Jeff Lane, Clark Kim, Anshul Goyal, Ryleigh Kostash,
Adobe Flash CS4, Photoshop, Excel, iPhoto, Canon SD780, Wacom pen tablets