A trying theme and a need for speed
Well folks, I have given the theme for this year's FBLA game design competition considerable thought and have found that the game I was going to make would not fit it well. This is mostly to help me cement my thoughts on the project I am making however if you are interested in making games for FBLA competitive events you may find this interesting. Oh also I hope you like reading because you'll be doing a lot! Here is the theme for the game:
Create a game that encourages critical thinking and decision-making
Include:
• Scenarios with ethical challenges
• Multiple outcomes based on player decisions
• Scoring (examples include points system, leaderboards, etc.)
Basically I'm going to have to treat this like a Game Jam with some extra challenges if I want to get anything done. A puzzle platformer would probably have a hard time with ethical challenges so I'll be scrapping that idea. Ethical challenges in video games that are truly "challenges" are not common and when they are done they are typically not done very well. For example forcing the player to do something bad and limiting their choices to different kinds of bad choices is not very fun.
Possible Inspirations:
The best ethical challenges I have seen are in the game "Disco Elysium", the game frequently goes into topics which really make you rethink your positions on critical issues, however I obviously could not make a game like that for a myriad of reasons. I think that a more text based game would probably work better for ethical challenges. Another good game with ethical challenges is called "Virtue's Last Reward" where players must either choose to Ally or Betray an opponent in a modified version of the prisoner's dilemma called the "AB game". I really like the idea of forcing the player to pick from only 2 choices as it would greatly simplify the process of coding, maybe even just making every question a True or False question. With this another issue rises, how do you score players based on how they would participate in ethical challenges? Sometimes there is an obvious "bad choice" in games which should be punished and therefore a "good choice" which could alternatively be rewarded (Like asking a player if they think murder is bad or not) but the reason ethical challenges are inherently "challenging" is due to them being ambiguous in nature. The reason Disco Elysium was able to have ethical challenges is because of its extreme realism in showing the consequences of the players actions if they did the same thing the protagonist did in real life. Also, in Disco Elysium, it is worth pointing out that you can't exactly win the game in a traditional sense, of course the game has endings where some are objectively better than others, but even in the very best ending you don't save the world, you just make it a slightly better place for the people. Virtue's Last Reward deals with ethical challenges in a different way by forcing the player to make evil choices in order to continue the story but they still force you to see the consequences of your actions, even if your choice was inevitable. Yet another game "Spec Ops: The Line" literally just makes you want to stop playing the game by making you consider if killing innocent people in a video game is ok even though you didn't do it in real life. The Hotline Miami duology, which I only know from the outside looking in as I do not like hurting other people, both ask you if you enjoy harming people but they ask both ironically and unironically by having the gameplay center around killing as many people as efficiently as possible, that is they WANT you to keep playing and not really to consider much about the ethics of your actions.
So, what will I do?:
The game will be called "To agree, or not to agree" and will be based around asking the player if they agree or disagree with statements. The scoring system will be based around what I will call "Agreement points" or just "AP" for short, where players will be rewarded for picking the option that I also would. This system is the only way I could reasonably score players where questions could still be somewhat subjective. With this system I could also ask less serious questions like "Violet is the best color" or "Snickerdoodles are the best cookies" without seeming too snarky because if you disagree with me that is just fine. Not all of the questions would have to be ethical in nature either, actually I would prefer there are as few as possible because serious questions don't necessarily make for a fun experience. For example if there was a question like "God is real" would an Atheist or a Theist still enjoy the game if my opinion did not align with theirs? It might be best if I make the game designed to only be played once in order to encourage players to be honest. If the game was meant to be replayed I would have to add in many different questions in order to keep players from just memorizing my responses, but it would still be inevitable that if the questions were just chosen randomly that they would be seen again. For a game like this I wonder if it would be a good idea to make the game the same every time, thus encouraging only one playthrough and making it easier for me to polish every single corner of the game? Honestly, games don't need to be re-playable for them to be good, it's just that most games are so that the total amount of time spent playing the game will be higher. This principle especially applies to older games where they had to have lots of content in order for them to justify their price tag. A game like "We become what we behold" is the same game with very small differences each time you play, but the ending is the same no matter what, that game is awesome so maybe I could do something similar. Because my game will be free for anyone and everyone to play, I won't have to worry about players not enjoying the game and wanting a review so I will just design around a brief but enjoyable experience. There is one part of the theme I have not addressed yet, having multiple outcomes.
Multiple Outcomes:
If a game is meant to only be played once having multiple endings would certainly not encourage players to just play once. Despite this, I will add in multiple different ways that the game will end, just because I have to. Depending on your score you will get a different final ending screen, but each question could have 2 different ending dialogues depending on if you agreed or disagreed with me. On top of the dialog feature I just wrote about there would be 3 *final judgment* screens where I would say one of three things, if you disagreed with me on every question I would say "I can't tell if you're a practical joker or the second incarnation of the Joker, either way I hope you didn't actually mean all the choices you just made", this would be fitting because I will almost certainly have an easy question which any non-insane human being would agree with my opinion and would choose accordingly, but players love to experiment with these kinds of things so I think it would be an interesting easter egg for Completionists. If players agreed completely with me I would say "Wow! You are either literally me, or you just think very similarly!" and lastly, the most likely ending to get would be when players agreed and disagreed with me and I would say "No judgment, we can agree to disagree on most of these.". Again, I would prefer to just have one ending to encourage players to be honest but because of the theme I will need to add endings anyways.
How long should this be?:
I want to aim for one playthrough to take only a few minutes and because some of the questions will be challenging players may take longer on some rather than others. I don't want this to feel like a drag because, lets be honest, surveys are usually not very fun, but because this will be inherently a "game" which means that there is something of a win condition, I will make it fun. In order to encourage players to take their time all of the questions will be voice acted by me, which might cause players to slow down in order to hear the full audio clip, of course this will be in edition to actual text so that if you happened to be deaf you would still be able to play. An easy question should not take very long to answer so I could anticipate players to take, maybe, 5 seconds but if the question was more challenging- and players were engaged- then naturally it would take longer for a player to answer, 20 seconds perhaps? I can't plan around an exact time that each player would take on each question- unless I added time limits for each question which I don't think would be fun, but it is completely fine if some players take longer on some questions than other players so I won't overthink the length of this game, but I do think that 10 questions would be a decent length, although this is certainly subject to change. Ultimately I don't think the length of the game matters as long as the quality of the game is good.
What about assets?:
I'll be able to make most of the assets on my own, the only exceptions will be sfx and music which I can just get from Pixabay and Incompetech respectively.
The scope of the project?:
The scope for this project will be small because I have a limited amount of time as well as only a moderate amount of skill in programming and game development in general. This is a project I should be able to complete in 30 hours, because the coding would not be very complicated, especially because I am using Godot and not using only a programming language.
Platforms?:
I'll just stick to Windows and a Web version as you are only required to support one of 4 different platforms (Windows 10, MacOS, Mobile, or Web).
Thanks for reading and if you have any questions be sure to ask them, I would love to talk with some others doing FBLA competitive events!
Get To Agree or Disagree
To Agree or Disagree
Short survey-like made for presentation
Status | Released |
Author | SubLuminary |
Genre | Puzzle |
Tags | competitive-events, fbla, inprogress |
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