Log 1

Team Members and Roles

We are a team of three, mostly with overlapping professional knowledge, so some duties will be shared among us.

Eduard:  Storyteller, Crafter

Enok: Artist, Crafter 

Peter: Designer, Game Master

Argumentation behind our decision based on the Empowered Participation method:

Using the Empowered Participation method, we each first wrote down what we considered important for each of the four roles in our game ideas. After sharing our considerations for each of the roles,  we then determined the role distribution by recognizing who had the best skills and understanding for each role.

Some tension existed regarding the ART role and the DESIGN and WRITER role, but we settled it by hashing it out in reflection, compromise and dialogue. E.g. some supplementary art will be done by Peter, but rest will be done with Enok as the main artist.

Culturechange

Incorporating cultural heritage into game design stacks the cards for innovation, by forcing you to think broader and deeper about the significance of the elements that you put inside it. Now, you are no longer dealing with pure fiction, but cherished, crushing or defining moments and artifacts from history that has touched flesh and bone people. We took upon this by meditating on our game ideas and retroactively refining them with cultural touches, like using folklore characters, or hanging real paintings from the artwalk on the virtual walls and letting them buff the player's powers meaningfully.

Artwalk

For the EXPERIENCE phase we went on an artwalk following the method of Culture Safari, where we individually took pictures of paintings, then compared them against each other.

Culturestorming

Our picks included some serious dark atmospheres, which brought out isolation and feelings of regret in us. This set the tone for most of our ideas, with the exception of #1, where the motivating factor is the love for creation itself. Another recurring theme was disagreement which set the stage for #2 and #5. The battle paintings inspired us to put the player in a powerless situation as shown in #3, but it also made us consider the exact opposite: to have them in a powerful position seen in #2 and #5. Nature paintings led to us thinking on #3 to completely cut the player from society. It also inspired #5 in a different way - exploiting nature for resources and the struggle to use it for good.

Game Ideas

We used the ideation wheel to helps us brainstorm unique ideas. Even though the wheel sports vague expressions, it still managed to help us come up with more specific ideas.

Idea 1:

• Game poking fun at the bureaucracy of the EU, remixing Austrian-Czech Franz Kafka story (public domain)
• Maybe has to make a game (or some other simple task) with increasingly strict rules
• Can’t proceed with the game before you fulfill task satisfactorily
• Example minigames
  • Drawing sprites (use machine learning to make sure that drawing looks like what it is supposed to look like somewhat, “draw a cat”)
  • Making a song with a piano / drums (“must be in the key of C”, “can’t use G note”, “has to include some note/notes that are played”)
  • Writing a story (arranging comic pictures, “the old man dies at the end")
• Each day/task ends with a letter from the EU about something new that the game must have
• Get to play your fucked up game at the end using the assets you made
• Inspiration from Papers Please

• Ideation Wheel: Remixing Heritage/History + Cultural Aesthetic + Simulation/Senses + Law of Rules

Idea 2:

• Game, where the protagonist is an interrogator, is required to follow a set of specific tasks when interrogating different persons with different cultural backgrounds and different stories. The tasks resonate with a specific way of thinking about people in general, a gruesome way which the protagonist does not directly agree with.
  • The goal in this game is to think freely and deviate from imposed unethical tasks when interrogating and deciding people's fate. 

• The game follows this pattern:   
  • You have different cases, where per case you sit on a table with the suspect and then you start your interrogation. 

• Before interrogating each suspect, you get their background on display. The description of their actions is written in a propagandic manner, making it look worse for people with certain ideologies, cultural backgrounds, and ethnicities. 

•  You get some tasks that you “should follow” that directly will decide the suspect fate, where you don’t have any influence. The tasks are unethical, deciding the fate by taking racial considerations, ideologies, sexual identifications (punish the suspect if different sexual orientation than heterosexuality), tasks that focus more on the person's identity and thinking in general, and tasks that don’t directly look at their commitment itself. 

• • The punishment is also decided in the task, where it varies drastically from the person's ethnicity, sex, and ideologies, regardless of their illegality.  

• If not following the rules, you get killed in the end, and if following the rules, you get promoted and receive a medal for being a good interrogator.
  • You get different outro messages regarding your decisions. 

Regarding Idea 2> Another idea would be to have the suspects actually being innocent and the actions they did was for the sake of their communities or for the society as a hole. The documentations about them are written in a propagantic way, showcasing their actions as being bad and  no good for our society, and therefore illegal. 

• Regarding ambient > Music, colors, and lights change given the decisions you take and if following the tasks or not. 

• Ideation Wheel: Equality, Puzzle, Cultural Gameplay, Redefining Values/Generations.  

Idea 3:

• Puzzle game where you are being trafficked and have to escape, like an escape room
• Start in a truck with a bag over your head, can only hear truck
• Can talk with other victims to escape and hear stories, have to make difficult decisions and trust people
• Point and click - looking at an object highlights it, shows a timer, which lets you interact without using your tied up hands until they are free
• Good and bad endings
  • Redemption where everyone escapes or you beat up trafficker
  • Only you escape
  • Someone else escapes because of you
  • No one escapes
• Timer to add stress.

• Ideation Wheel: Rewriting History/Reality + Cultural Stories + Puzzler/Adventure + Human Rights

Idea 4:

• Another idea would be of a traveler who lost himself in an isolated place and you want to find your way home. 
• You don’t have access to technology and start with 0$. You need to communicate with people around you to get hints about directions you need to navigate in order to advance towards your home. 
• You have the following attributes => Comfort, Money, Energy, Hunger, Thirst.
  • Energy, Hunger, Thirst => You pay money for those
  • Comfort => Depends on your decisions, regarding your environment and relation with the other people.

• Transportation can cost money or be free => Depending on your interaction with people and the context itself

• In order to get money, you can work for people (action or solve a puzzle) + learning about their cultural background in the meanwhile. These informations can also be used to build stronger relationships with them, which can potentially benefit you.

• You will learn about different perspectives regarding the region you are situated, learning more about how do different societies think.

• You can be tricked, lied or be in an ethical situation where you need to balance fairness with personal safety.

• You can build multiple relationships with people that have totally different perspectives and ideologies

• Your goal is to reach home, a modern urban region.  Given advancement in the story and reaching more and more urban environments, you get more and more hints about your home.
  • The goal of this game is not to reach home as fast as possible, but to learn about people as much as possible, getting as much and various experiences as you can get, while keeping yourself safe. 

Ideation Wheel: Human Dignity, Adventure, Cultural Gameplay, Remixing Heritage/History

Idea 5:

To play a ruler and build your small empire behind your table alongside the realms most influential faces watching your every move, interfering with your actions for their own benefits.

This game would either be a real-time or turn based strategy, with a political focus. The challenge is balancing war with peace as the latter helps the kingdom prosper, while the kingdom is facing dangers enclosing slowly on its walls.

• Play as a ruler
• Order units around the map in front of you using your hands, make them:
  • Gather resources
  • Send out scouts, messengers
  • Fight armies as they travel
  • Siege towns

• The map of the realm features difficult terrain, water and weather

• Peace generates art, the amount of which are measured in paintings situated behind the player. They should resemble the kingdoms overall mindset. (Hitting certain paintings or combos of paintings should reward the player with an achievement)
• Fighting battles also adds to the collection, but they are placed elsewhere. The player should be able to browse through them.
  • Scrape Wikipedia for historical battle paintings and the battle statistics, and whenever a fight is won get a painting closest resembling the painting battle statistics. (Potentially giving an achievement for famous battles)

• Have influential people from the realms (but mostly from your kingdom) watch over your shoulder working in their own favor, trying to manipulate you. The composition of influencers is dictated by the current art direction.
  • They give the player quests - failing many of these will leave the kingdom voting for a new ruler, banishing the player
  • Whisper, complain and gratify the player

Ideation Wheel: Democracy, Simulation/(Strategy), Cultural Gameplay, Remixing Heritage/History