Postmortem

My game is inspired by a joke in the show How I Met Your Mother, wherein A character’s husband is so nice they help a stranger load furniture into a truck only to find out that the stranger they helped was actually robbing the apartment and he had just aided in theft. My design process for this project focused on the player’s limited knowledge of the game itself and their innate instinct as a gamer to normalize, and possibly even take satisfaction in, looting valuables. With this focus I felt it made sense to have the player “aid” the theft by playing as the criminal unknowingly. The next logical step was for me to have the player find this out at the end of the game and in order to make that punchline hit a bit better I thought it’d be fun to have small jokes in the game that suddenly all make sense with this new piece of information. This led to me giving descriptions of items being well kept, or items having personal value, etc. My thought process was always abusing the instinct of a player to not question picking up trinkets even when they’re not what they may seem. Properties of Bitsy I really found value in were its dialog feature, text effects, sprite editor, inventory, and 2-frame animation styles. Thanks to Bitsy’s dialog feature I was able to create text allowing for dialogue from the homeowner, item descriptions to give the player hints about the items belonging to someone else, and world building with things like broken glass in the environment to imply someone breaking in. I used text effects to add emphasis and intensity to the homeowner's panicked cries after seeing you in his home. The sprite editor and 2-frame animation styles were used just to add sparkles and give the valuables form. Lastly the inventory system was used to keep track and make sure the player was robbing the home before moving on, thus making sure that punchline would make sense. Variables were used in my game to keep track of what items the player has collected and allow progression accordingly. In this game I am proud of my clever use of descriptions. Again the way I made sure to weave in certain implications allows the player to appreciate what they’re being told after the punchline but still not raise any eyebrows too early and spoil the joke. What didn’t turn out as expected was the scene with the homeowner. Originally I expected something a bit more dramatic but I settled for cutting out the music and using text effects to add my own sense of drama. In future projects I would definitely take the time to play around more in every aspect I already discussed. I’d take time to play around more in making use of every property and affordance, I’d play around more with my focus and see how to further abuse player habits, I’d play around with variables further to see how unique I can make progression, and lastly I’d play around more with development so that nothing doesn’t turn up to my expectations unless its in a good way.