APD - Week 8 - Play and Body
THEME
Play and Body
Please feel free to play yourself~ https://hiyokaygames.itch.io/rain-rain-go-away (pwd: magi)
Progress video: https://youtu.be/OxcpYbbVwMU
CONTEXT
This week’s theme is quite a challenge since I can’t think of a way to incorporate an actual physical body into anything I want to make. Since I want to focus on making interactive works as opposed to animations and I don’t want to step into the scary world of AR and VR without having a stronger grasp on unity.
So instead of focusing on how physical movements can generate something, I tried to go with considering the body in a conceptual capacity. More specifically, the connection/balance between the body and mind.
I remembered this song quote by Marianna Page I used to like when I was younger. “I have acid rain in my brain and it's killing the flowers in my heart.” I visualized this image of a small girl with an umbrella protecting her self from the raindrops or tears coming from a bigger version of herself. Although this may seem to have more to do with the mind than the body, one can have a significant effect on the other.
Sebastian Martin Möring suggest in his thesis on ‘Games and Metaphor’ that ‘the notion of metaphor is very often used in close conceptual proximity with the concept of simulation’. That gave me the idea of trying to simulate the concept of the body being affected by the mind.
The mind-body connection, a person’s thoughts, feelings and other things can positively or negatively affect biological functioning. I really wanted to incorporate the subject of our minds affecting how healthy our bodies are, by making a platform catching
METHOD
I stuck to my initial idea of the umbrella metaphorically protecting the girl from painful rain. I sketched out the concept of the big version of the girl crying and tears fall down as raindrops onto an aquarium-type platform and also a goldfish bowl on top of the girl’s head. The aquarium was meant to represent the heart and the fishbowl, the brain, and the tears were the girl’s emotions, that if left uncollected would overflow both the heart and the brain.
After making the initial concept sketches I used these sketches to create a working base for the game before going ahead and creating the actual artwork. I chose this workflow instead of my usual ‘do the art and worry about the coding later’ mindset because I was trying my hand at pixel art instead of my usual linework.
After these attempts, I can say for certain that pixel art’s not for me, but it was nice to focus on an entirely new art style as opposed to the ones I’m used to. Pixel animation, however, was a lot simpler than regular animation, because it’s simply the matter of moving pixels around and it has a naturally choppy feel to it so making a smooth animation isn’t a requirement.
Perhaps I spent too much time on the pixel art side of things and less on the coding, but I struggled a lot with the logic this time around. There were a lot of bugs and functionality issues, and it took a lot of trial and error to be able to fix everything and present it in a playable form. One particularly tricky problem I had was with the rigidbody of the small girl toppling over as she moves. After a lot of googling, I figured out that I could set a freeze rotation property in the inspector values.
I also wanted the player to be able to control the fish’s movements with up and down arrow keys but implementing them would have taken too much extra time and wouldn’t have added anything extra to the theme, other than being an interesting extension of the existing game mechanic.
RESPONSE / REFLECTION
Looking back on this week’s work, I think I spent way too much time on this than I should have for a weekly task. To be honest, with two more weeks to go, I really wanted to try my hand at a pixel platformer type game.
I asked a couple of my friends to play it and give me feedback even though at that point it was a bit too late to change things. Friend M said “the overall concept is very pog” and that it was a ‘super cute game’ but that he struggled with the speed of the raindrops and having to catch them.
Friend S went into more detail saying it was “a really pretty good-looking game” and he didn’t need a lot of direction to know what to do. On the downside, the end screen is tuck with the girl drowning with no replay button and that something like a high-score counter would be beneficial in making sure there’s an aim. I ended up incorporating the replay feature but couldn’t figure out how to add in a score tracker.
All in all, it’s not too bad for my first attempt at something resembling a platform game. I also think the visuals did a reasonable job of portraying the theme of the mind-body connection, although of course, it could’ve been better.
REFERENCES
Hart, P., 2016. What Is The Mind-Body Connection? | Taking Charge Of Your Health & Wellbeing. [online] Taking Charge of Your Health & Wellbeing. Available at: <https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/what-is-the-mind-body-connection>
Martin Möring, S., 2013. Games And Metaphor – A Critical Analysis Of The Metaphor Discourse In Game Studies.
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