THEME:
Play and stillness
<Lighthouse>
CONTEXT:
According to the week theme stillness based on play, 'Stillness' to me, is not only stagnate, time, or something in a physical concept, but also some other things such as silence and calm in a psychological concept, I had some ideas which focus on present silence or calm by using some artistic techniques, such as photography works, but I decided to focus more on exploring game concept development and give up these several ideas related to other fields this week. While developing my work, I kept exploring related game designs. There are a lot of excellent works which inspired a a lot. For example, INSIDE(https://www.taminggaming.com/game/Inside) is a puzzle-platformer adventure game developed and published by Playdead in 2016 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows, in this game, stillness can be found to be used to show its dark and deep theme --- the destruction of technology due to the darkness of human nature, stillness not only plays a role in building atmosphere, but also be used in the design of the game level itself --- NPC, props, ect. There is another game design I played several years ago which I could not find it now, fortunately I find a similar one, a level-breaking game that players should go around obstacles and move from one circle to another within a limited time(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJBRIFHEk_k), this game has little to do with the theme of stillness, but it was a great inspiration for my work this week.
METHOD:
First, a vague concept appeared in my mind, which is a game I used to play when I was a kid, in China it was called 1, 2, 3, wooden man, one player(we can call him the 'ghost') is chosen to be the one who need to catch everyone when someone touches him upon the shoulder, before it, other players need to slowly walk toward him(he is asked to stand far away with his back to everyone) and after he shouts out '1, 2, 3, wooden man!' that everyone should stop moving otherwise this player should be out, after someone tapped on his shoulder, he should start to chase everyone, the one who is caught should be the next ' ghost'. There is a similar one called Mannequin Challenge which became popular in various countries. I applied this concept when I design my work, as it shown in the picture, I call this work LIGHTHOUSE because the prop in the center is the top view of the lighthouse, which is set rotating lighting device on the top of the tower, I applied it in the concept of my game design, player should stop when the light hits the player, by long pressing the screen to pause the ball movement, then the player needs to catch up with the props in front to get to the next level, and the difficulty of each level is upgraded, such as the number of the lights and props will increase, the speed will also get faster and faster, making it more difficult to play. At the same time, through the use of colors, sound effects, etc. to create relaxation and tension, slowly piling up between simplicity and difficulty.
RESPONSE:
I made a video in order to concretely show this game concept, incuding switching between levels, in response to 'stillness', it shown in the operation of the game.
REFLECTION:
Stillness is a good concept that fits well into game design, whether use it in setting the level difficulty design, or in creating the atmoshpere.
REFERENCE:
https://freesound.org/people/mickleness/sounds/384185/
https://freesound.org/people/BloodPixel/sounds/567193/
https://freesound.org/people/BloodPixel/sounds/561391/
https://freesound.org/people/ProjectsU012/sounds/341695/
https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/403005/
Downloads:
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Download File: apd-play-and-stillness-lighthouse.mp4
About This Work
By Sher Zhang
Email Sher Zhang
Published On: 01/06/2021