0.Group members
| NAME | MAJOR | DUTY |
| Mingyi Liu | MA Game Design | Games Design& Arts |
| Yunke Wang | MA Game Design | Games Design& Engineering |
| Shih Kai Chuan | MA illustration and Visual Media | Narrative Design& Arts |
| Anlin Liu | MA Game Design | Interactive Design& Arts |
| Ziyu Yun | MA Game Design | Interactive Design& Arts |
| Peiwei Luo | MA Game Design | PM& Sounds Managements |
| Jingya Li | MA Sound Arts | Sound effects |
| Dereck | MA Sound Arts | BGM |
| William Carkeet | MA Sound Arts | BGM |
1.Design Details
1.1 tools
Our group use Lark for recording meeting notes, writing design documents, file transfer and recording playtests, we use unity to do game development , we use Plastic SCM for version control.
1.2 game concept
In the game there are tutorials that teach players how to move and how to jump to fit the physical logic and behavioural norms of the game world. At the beginning of our lives, we have parents who teach us how to walk, express ourselves and a range of social behaviours; who teaches them these rules? Perhaps the answer can be found in the interaction with non-living beings. We want to focus on how the brain learns these behaviours that we take for granted in our interactions with the world.
So perhaps the use of robots as vehicles for narrative design can replicate this learning process. Many films and TV shows use robots to discuss the questions of “who we are, where we come from and where we are going”. In Blade Runner, for example, the company that created the bionic man implants them with fake childhood photos to trigger associations and thus complete their self-awareness; in Westworld, the creators of the robots provide them with a ‘maze’ of puzzles to induce them to think on their own as they solve them; in In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there is a company that specialises in memory erasure, making it as easy as eating and sleeping；in Black Mirror Season 5: Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too, there is a robot doll based on a pop star idol, Ashley O, Ashley’s agency copied all the information in her brain to create a chat machine with the same name and could be bought as a normal toys.
Therefore in the concept of this project I have referred to the concepts in the above works, and then I combined those with the concept of “My Odyssey( Player as a personality back-up trying to find a way to avoid be deleted )”—one of my game that was developed in 2019—and got the final version of the game concept: if a well-grown adult backed up herself, and upload herself to a robot or a device, there must be a process for her to fit in and Activating brain functions again.
So in this game, I created a company that sells companion robots and set up a triangle around the company: an elderly couple, a memory engineer and the company, all three of which intersect in this virtual world because of the companion robots.
When thinking about the theme of the game, we also considered the issue of naming it and eventually found the most suitable name for it—“stay with dolly girl”. 60s Dolly Girls was a fashion trend when girls would dress up in childrens-style clothing. This concept can perfectly connect the motivation of the engineer(player), the old couple and the company; as player have to fill the brain of the doll robot to finish the job and also finish the game goal, the old couple want to keep their dead daughter by their side forever, and the company aims to sell the idea of doll robots will provide the eternal companionship to customers.
1.3 game narrative
The player is a personality-filling company worker whose daily job is to fill the robot with false childhood memories by linking the neurons in the brain in order to complete the robot’s cognitive behavior.On this day, he receives an unusual, assignment from an old couple whose daughter has died, and the player is asked to populate a doll robot with a digital backup of her dead daughter.
The entire game is a process of the player fitting in her daughter’s digital soul into the robot’s physical body (a process of synchronization), so that each level is a link to the completion of this digital soul cognition, corresponding to a different content of each level is also linked to the daughter’s preferences during her life.
1.4 game mechanism
There are three main space in the gameplay screen:
a.feedback space—robot’s brain;
b.operation space—player control a spot to connect other spots;
c.targets space—there are three sets of targets present the goals, and will refresh randomly along with the time.
d.timer space—there are three round of play, one round got a limited time.
so the gameplay loop will be this:
Player controls the main element(the cell) to connect other five elements(doll’s neurons, each of those representing the respective brain sections ) ——try to fit the target sets above——fit at least one set of targets——The corresponding partition is partially rendered.
Our game mechanism are inspired by “Florence” at first, and was aimed to complete a narrative game with light game play. Then we realised that Florence might look simple, but they had done a lot of polishing work on the interaction design, which was actually refined but not simple, and we might not have been able to achieve such a goal in this collaboration since we got limited time and resources. Then we decided to took David’s advice—finishing a minigame collection. So we noticed a kind of collect and avoid game like this:
1.5 game flow
1.6 game arts
a.game start
b.computer
c. gameplay