Below is a group collaboration and modified version after receiving feedback from Susan:
Original Premise:
When people blink, the Sun blinks, and the world is dark. (by Lu Zhang. )
The Big Idea:
Keep the Sun bright(healthy)!
Gameplay:
- To stop the Sun from being dark/going out because the Sun gets sore eyes and blinks and whenever it blinks the world is dark and this isn't good!
- The player needs to collect sunflowers to sprinkle their juice on the Sun's eyes
- Players need to walk around the forest in the dark to collect flowers…
- The sunflower glows in the dark and this is how the player sees it. Black shadow chasing the player in the dark...
- When the player has found the sunflower - the darkness disappears for a short time...
Theme:
Lost and found the bright.
HOW HAVE WE USED OUR THEME TO SHAPE THE DESIGN OF ITS INTERACTION?
This is a 3D desktop game, a webcam captures the player's eyelid movement and binds the player to the Sun. The dark Sun needs to walk around in a dark forest and search for curing flowers.
Lost- darkness
Found - brightness
And also we use spatial sounds to create the proximity of enemies.
Watch the Final Cutscene： here
Reflection:
This work displays the final cutscene of an in-class interactive game design. By using a gradient color swift, and a changing expression of the main character, I am able to demonstrate how a bunch of sunflowers helps the blinking sun to recover. In this sunflower-gated interactive game, while the webcam catches the player's eye movement at the beginning, the player's blinking results in the sun's blinking, and the screen turns dark for around 15 seconds each time with a certain delay. However, sunflowers can cure the Sun's eye pain, are scattered in a forest and needed to be collected by the player in the dangerous dark.
Similar work exists on a mobile game named Blindscape, which provides the player an auditory experience, without any vision but a black screen, and a linear narrative associated with sound effects. Similar but horrible work can also be found in the game Alien: Isolation, where the player is exploring alone in a dark spaceship. By examining both Blindscape and Alien: Isolation, I reflected that ideas of interactive games in dark are mostly of the horror genre. But Blinking Sun could be positive as it has a changing color background from dark to bright gradually. On the other hand, by going through the week 8 in-class practice, I realized that interactive games contain choices at each stuck point, at least two: yes or no; or more choices lead to different narratives, that are usually seen in non-linear interactive games. Thinking through these, I've decided to set the game in a positive color theme and more than two choices for the player at each selective point in the coming gameplay design.
