Project Drugs and the City :
Gorro
A promotional and gameplay video can be found at the bottom of this page in case you don't want to read the text. Click on this to jump to the videos.
Docs
Project document (Dutch) [pdf]Team
- me - Project lead / Tech programmer / Game designer
- Sonja van Vuure - Artist
- Bart Jan Bultman - Gameplay programmer / Game designer
- Danny Groenen - Interaction designer / Jack of all trades
Everyone has also done non-role specific tasks to keep the project moving forward.
Lovely render of the team by our artist Sonja - click to enlarge
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Project
For this project we needed to create a serious game for secundary students with ‘Drugs and the city’ as a theme. The intention was to create a game that informed the students about something drugs related in a big city from a single perspective like government, drug user, etc.
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Finding a suitable perspective
Very early on, we all agreed that we didn't wanted to make a game that takes the player by hand and spews out a ton of already seen and / or heard before lessons.
We all thought about a bunch of things we could do until Danny came up with a fun idea. You
would be a gnome who has to feed drugs to people to stay alive. You would have to find out
what is the correct dose to give to a player, so there would be the opportunity someone gets
an overdose.
So for this game, we had chosen the perspective of the hallucination.
We were all excited about the idea, until we had our first meeting with our tutor. We found out our game was not giving a positive message to the players. Many players would probably have fun in killing the humans and wouldn't grasp the intentional message.
With the above being totally true, we had to come up again with new ideas. For the sake of
our project to be on a steady course, Bart Jan and I, the main game designers, met on the
following Saturday to pick out the final concept from our new ideas.
So we ended up taking the perspective of a friend of a drug user. How can you prevent the
drug user from doing stupid things while being drugged.
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Game concept
Although our gnome concept was put aside, we ended up again with another game concept concerning a gnome. By input from every team member, a concept appeared where you as the player would have to help a gnome who experiences bad side effects from using drugs.
We thought about different gnomes who each would have used different kinds of drugs and so each would have a different set of symptoms. Because of the time constraint, we only worked out one gnome.
We researched possible side effects from different drugs and how you should anticipate on
them. The gameplay became a fairly simple action / reaction game. You would
see a symptom and you would have to play the right action to counter it. Every symptom would
have a value that is altered when playing an action. The symptom with the highest value would
be the one you are playing against.
The goal is to eventually solve every symptom. But there is a possibility you can also cause
a symptom to get out of hand by playing the wrong actions.
You would compete with 3 other players against each other.
Just playing the actions wasn't very exciting, so we enhanced the idea a bit but still tried to remain the simplicity of the original concept. For every action you play that is positive for a given symptom, you get positive points. For every negative actions, you get negative points. But with a twist. If the actions would only have negative effects, they would never be used. That's why we added a small advantage to it. You would receive negative points, but to make it more acceptable, you could also choose another player who's points would get reduced a bit.
To add more fun to the formula, we also added silly actions that can be played. For the most part, they are all negative, but because the game is played with 4 people, they provide a few laughs.
Concept ideas 1 - click to enlarge
Concept ideas 2 - click to enlarge
Concept ideas 3 - click to enlarge
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Playtesting
Something I wanted to do well this project, was playtesting. Because of the simple concept, we have successfully performed a few playtest sessions. Every session, we tweaked and altered the game to find the right balance.
We also conducted a playtest session to find out how and if people were learning from the
game. It turned out people were actually not learning directly from the game, but from
communication with each other. People told about their own experiences when acting against a
symptom and this would stick on the other players minds.
So indirectly, people learn from our game.
And everyone loved the silly actions like ‘Imitating a ghost’ when the symptom would be ‘anxious’.
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Tech
For this concept, the idea of augmented reality became a very interesting technology. The
players would see themselves sitting behind the gnome they are trying to help.
We also liked the idea you would perform actions by playing cards. A mixture of digital
and physical gaming.
When doing research on augmented reality, we stumbled upon ARToolkit and ofxFiducialFinder. Danny and I had tried to make one of the technologies work, but our efforts were in vain. After losing two full days, I decided to stop our attempts and look at the FLARToolkit, the ARToolkit for Flash. We hadn't picked this technology straight away, because we knew it would be less stable and slower then the other two options. But we were losing so much time, it was worth taking a look at it and be aware of the restraints.
An advantage of using FLARToolkit, would be that I myself am not familiar yet wit C or C++ (used by ARToolkit and ofxFiducialFinder), but very familiar with actionscript. The same was true for Bart Jan, who wanted to program the gameplay. Especialy for him, it would be easier to program using actionscript, because he didn't have that much programming experience yet.
FLARToolkit in combination with FLARManager was very insightful to create the technology we
would need. Because there was no example capable of showing multiple custom 3D models on
screen, I had to build it myself by relying on the available examples. The programming for
this part had to be done in Flex, new territory for me.
Bart Jan however, could easily program the gameplay in standard Flash and I would then just
import the SWF and link everything together.
The most important thing I discovered, is that Flash is not very good at doing garbage collection, resulting in our game to flood the RAM. I programmed a workaround to prevent this, but it's a shame that after all these years, the Flash developers haven't fixed this yet.
Danny and I figured out how the patterns were build, so Danny made custom patterns for our game.
Some card examples - click to enlarge
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Art
Sonja wanted a nasty gnome instead of the common versions. This would suit the drug theme
better. She created the textures for our 3D model by using actual paint. She made a digital
versions, printed them out, painted directly over them and then scanned them back in.
She wanted to create an analog feel for the digital character because it was augmented reality.
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Result
And here is our game. I could put the it online, but if you don't have the accompanying cards, you just can't play. Also, the game is entirely in Dutch because we created it for Dutch secondary students.
Promo film made by Danny Groenen.
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