The Project
This is an applied game that demonstrates how people judge others and see them for something that they aren’t. The game takes the format of an escape “room” where the player has to solve 3 puzzles to get out.
The goal for the player is to assign a home to 3 robots. They can talk to these robots to ask them where they would like to live. With each puzzle our goal was to break the expectation of the player more and more and make them think outside the box.
The Process
This project was made by De Wolkenkrabberz, a team of 3 game designers. At the start of the project we where tasked to make a digital escape room that would spark conversation about a social issue. This is how we landed on the idea to try and make people realize that everyone judges things bases on assumptions.
All three of us were responsible for the core game design during the project. During this process we made a quick prototype. Apart from that, I was responsible for writing the dialogue and implementing the dialogue system. For this project we used Yarn Spinner. I had never worked with this system before, so I really enjoyed learning how to use it. While I was writing the dialogue, we had many brainstorm sessions where we discussed what we wanted the story to be and how this would be integrated into the mechanics of the game.
Puzzle Prototype
During the design progress we wanted to create a puzzle that made people think outside the box. This prototype ended up being wildly different from the final game. In this prototype the player’s goal is to navigate a maze that they can see on a screen, but the arrows in front of the screen only point up and right. So it is up to the player to figure out that they need to hit the other objects in the room and find out which one moves the maze and in what direction.