Gameplay Journal #10 — Finale
When thinking of value based games the usual sorts of things that come to mind are usually either games that aren't meant to be fun and tend to lean more on getting their message across clearly like a sim that puts you in the shoes of an oppressed individual, or games that get a message across really well on top of being fun and usually take a lot more time and effort to craft like Night in the Woods. Unfortunately for me I both don't have a lot of time for this project, and also don't have the strongest position to try and communicate important topics that I don't have a lot of experience living or knowledge of. Plus, those just aren't the kinds of games I really wanna make. Well, maybe games like Night in the Woods, but then comes the time constraint issue. So when I started thinking of ideas for this project my main requirements were:
1) simplicity, something I could feasibly make on my own in a few weeks
2) At least a little but fun/amusing/nice to look at even if only to me
3) Still have something to do with something that I believe in/value
And with those in mind I came up with a few ideas. The first was something along the lines of trying to make a game that in and of itself conveyed the thought that games can be art, but as I started getting into the weeds of the idea it started to become a bit too big for the scope of this project. But its an idea that's been shelved for later. The next was more to do with large corporations and somehow trying to convey the message that they aren't exactly a good thing, but again this seemed out of scope due to being a difficult value to convey efficiently without a lot of writing or development. From that idea though came the one that I ultimately settled on and have been in the beginning stages of developing. Instead of looking at all corps I decided to focus on one, specifically Boston Dynamics and their repeated behavior of trying to anthropomorphize their robots, specifically Spot the quadruped frame one. I personally believe that by putting out so many videos of these robots dancing and behaving ‘cutely’ they are slowly normalizing the sight of these robots and conditioning people to see them as cute, despite the fact that one of the major sources of funding for these robots is the US military and by extension the police. And we’ve already had instances of these robots showing up on our own streets during certain events, and its already been shown that people respond positively to them. Its because of this that I personally don't really like these robots and feel that more people should be far more distrustful of them and Boston Dynamics before we start seeing them become normal fixtures of police/military enforcement and surveillance.
And to convey this message I had the idea to create a game that poises these robots as a threat to the player, and to give the player the goal of searching city streets in cover of night to find and destroy these robots that are patrolling and perhaps enforcing some sort of curfew. So far I have created my own take on the little yellow robot (pictured at the beginning of this page) and programmed it to patrol paths and chase down the player should they be spotted by it, and I've created a melee weapon the player can use to fight back. I plan to flesh out a decent map of a city block that will have multiple robots patrolling that the player needs to find and defeat to win, and will probably have obstacles like security cameras that would trigger a game over or blockades to get in the way, etc. It has a way to go, but the bones are there and I think that in the end it will hopefully communicate the message that I am putting into it without being too preachy while still being fun.