APD week 11 - Play and Stillness

Theme
Play and Stillness

Context
Neko Atsume
https://www.imore.com/neko-atsume-game-guide-how-collect-all-cats

The stillness theme of this week means games with a slow-pace and relatively still game play experience. Some idle games were shown during the class in which most of them require players to wait after they’ve done some operation in the game. In the game Neko Atsume, the players decorate their home with the toys that cats like and put some cat food in their home then wait for the cats to come. If the players come back to the game at a suitable time, they can see the cats in their home and take pictures of them. This game has inspired me to make a fishing game where players need to wait until the fish is hooked.

This project sits in the field of symbolic play. In the game, money and heart are used as the fish bait to represent the form of players putting their effort. It involves a little bit of role play as well, the players need to imagine they are really fishing and wait patiently for the fish. 

This game can also involve social play by triggering the players to discuss and exchange information on what fish they have caught.

Method
The graphical assets are drawn in Adobe Photoshop. Then, they were put into Unity and coded with C#. The background music was adopted from the Youtube Audio Library.

Response
Play Fishing in the Dark here:
https://simmer.io/@MargaretWong/fishing-in-the-dark

When thinking about stillness, my initial ideas were puzzle game and room escape game which require the players to spend a long time on thinking instead of controlling the motion of the characters busily. Yet, I have kind of tried both genres and they are quite conventional ideas. Therefore, I continued on brainstorming and had an idea of letting the players combine different animals and see how the resulting “robot” would look (inspired by the deer simulator I presented in last week). 

After that, an idea of making a fishing game popped up. The period players waiting for the fish is the stillness part of my game. I was thinking different fishing bait can catch different fish, for example, a bamboo can hook a panda up. However, the workload may be too much if there are too many different kinds of bait and “fishes”. Hence, I had an idea of fishing with money or heart as the bait. It takes a short time to catch a fish if money is used as bait, but those fish are materialistic and may not be good (eg selfish/ devil). While it takes a longer time to catch a fish with heart, those fish are long lasting and something makes you a better person (eg growth and knowledge). On the other hand, the players need to be patient and wait for the fish to be hooked. That’s why there is soothing animation and music to make them relaxed.

Reflections
When I let my friends play the game, there are a few positive responses on the graphic and music about creating a really soothing feeling for them. Also, some of them like the message behind this work. Quite a number of them tried to fish for a few times to see if different fish would be caught. This showed that the game was able to trigger the curiosity of the players to play for a few times for different fish.

However, most of them asked me how to play because they see nothing after choosing the bait. Actually, they just need to wait for the “You’ve caught a fish” message. One of them asked me what would be seen if a fish was caught. This reflects that my game didn’t teach the players what they should expect for. An instruction telling them they need to wait for the “You’ve caught a fish” message is needed. Some of them said that it takes too long to catch a fish if a heart is chosen as the bait. In addition, one of my friends suggested adding the shadow of a fish before a fish is caught. 

The reason for the failure of my game is that I didn’t manage the players’ expectations well and I didn’t know how long the players were willing to wait for a fish to be caught. After listening to the feedback, quite a lot of them expect something to happen within 10 seconds or so. When something doesn’t match with the players’ expectations, it frustrates the players (Rouse, 2005). The book has also mentioned that “players expect to do, not to watch”, I think this is why many of my friends said they didn’t know how to play my game because they expect they need to do something to catch the fish instead of watching the animation and listening to the soothing music. When I play games, I used to skip the animation and go straight to the gameplay as well. Addressing this, maybe I can let the players do some mini-takes before they catch the fish, for instance tapping the screen for 3 times.

p.s. I have changed the length of waiting time from 10-20 seconds to 3-10 seconds for fishing with money and from 1-2 minutes to 20-30 seconds for fishing with the heart after receiving the feedback.

References

Richard Rouse III, “What Do Players Expect?” Game Design: Theory and Practice (2nd Edition) (Wordware Game Developers Library). 2005. 189. Web
https://flylib.com/books/en/4.479.1.15/1/