Final Post

Overall the play testing was quite successful - people felt sad, but the problem was the mechanics didn't compliment the message. To rectify this I have iterated in the following ways: The title provides an immediate goal and context for the game: Get To The Bridge. Players know they must find a bridge as their …

The Game

    The game will start as the above image shows, with the player character stood beside an empty guard tower with a purple collectable on the first screen. I chose a purple circle because purple is the predominant colour of the player character, so by having purple for both it will create an mental …

Analysis of Other Games

Analysis of other games and how they promote character player empathy. The beginners guide: the beginners guide is a walking simulator style game in which a silent protagonist is guided through a series of different games by a narrator. The narrator is telling players the story of the individual who made the games: Coda. Players …

Emotions

In order to create an empathetic connection between players and player characters first I need to know what an emotion is and how to evoke them.   Research into emotions, where they come from and how they are triggered has a lot of similarities to empathy. The various theories and approaches (cognitive, behavioural etc) are …

Statement of Deliverables

Having successfully completed my progress update presentation for the tutors at university they have offered me some advice to move forward with. They have advised me to make a statement about what my deliverable s will be, how I want them judged, and some more advice to really focus the artefact and research to the …

Playtesting Results

It seems that I have achieved some kind of emotional connection, some of the time, between players and the characters presented to them in the game. This connection is derived from human desire to place meaning and to humanise everything. Peoples desire to place traits and behaviours in order to correctly categorise stimuli (visual or …

Digital Dabbling

After a meeting with some tutors to discuss the issues I was having getting the players to empathise with characters they made some useful suggestions for me to take forward. These suggestions boiled down to a simple solution: try to create empathy and an emotional reaction in a single person, then scale up to multiple …

New Game Prototype

This game will be a storytelling card game with mild RPG elements. A group of 2-6 players will slowly make their way through a shared deck of cards in order to tell the story of how their character will cure a family curse. Game objective: to cure a family cure. Cooperation, empathy, community. Individual Objective: …

Character Empathy – Summary Of Progress

Goal: To create player-character empathy in a multiplayer game that I can use to affect the emotional states between players over time. So far I have explored both types of empathy, and how to elicit an empathetic response in players. I have created games that are fun, that when people play they do experience changes …

Character Creation Iteration

At this point in development the character creation system needs serious iteration. IT fails to make enough of an impact on the player experience to make players care about the characters. The characters are currently just thin veneers for players and provide no actual immersion or purpose in the game. In order to try and …