Creating this sketch
definitely had many challenges, and to complete it in 12 weeks with other
coursework going on did not help. However, with such a tight deadline, I was
able to make quick decisions that I otherwise would have spent a long time
debating on. Like in my first blog post where I documented the first iteration
of my game sketch, the idea started off similar to what I ended up with. The
first iteration was a gay cruising simulator set in a forest with a much more
ambitious scope: sex scene animations, combat and a linear narrative structure
that would have required more attention to detail in terms of writing. I wanted
to approach game design from a queer theory background. I asked myself, “How
could I queer game design without placing all of the queerness in its content,
but also in the design of the narrative and gameplay?” This means how to
implement non-linearity, repetition and failure, non-language communication and
interaction, anti hierarchical, anti productivity (eg: goals, or beginning
middle end) in the mechanics of the game. I realized quickly that this game,
even as a sketch, would take more than 12 weeks to complete and I scrapped the
idea for something I was much more interested in pursuing, designing a
architecturally-led game space.
I started off with
modelling the space with the CSG plugin tool, SabreCSG.
From here I added a
texture to start getting a sense of how the space is going to feel.
Immediately after
this I started to play with lighting.
From here I started
to drop placeholder objects in to experiment with how the dialogue system would
work in this space. For my dialogue solution, I used Yarn. Yarn is a Twine-like
plugin for Unity that is much more lightweight and has a lot of possibilities
for customization.
After figuring out
the basic experience or structure of my game sketch, I had a few playtesters
and got some important feedback to what more can I implement. I went back to
the drawing boards to refine my idea.
Afterwards, I started
to fine-tune my player character and who he was in order to make the narrative
and the experience of the space logical. One way to mitigate around my problem
that there were no human bodies the player can interact with in the space was
to create peep holes or glory holes for the player to discover new encounters.
In real life, the playfulness of bathhouses are of course, the people you
encounter and the interactions you have with them. This play is highly driven
by the space of the bathhouse. Bathhouses are designed like a funhouse, the way
the hallways are organized like a maze, the endless rooms, the corners, the
lighting all facilitate this type of queer play that allows the player to never
feel like they’re ever in the same space. The space is simple, but has enough
variation for surprises and intrigue. Furthermore, after understanding my
player as a voyeur of the space instead of an active participant, I started
placing peep holes around to promote the idea of voyeurism as a gameplay
experience.
The finish the game,
I refined my writing, dressed the space up more, and used level design
practices such as placing valves and doors to slow down the experience of the
game and to force the player discover the space in its totality and its
nuances. Although I wasn’t particularly successful in queering gameplay or
narrative in video games and instead used many traditional and popular game
design elements, I still think I was successful in creating a space that was
queer in its design and not just in its usage. What i mean by this is that the
design of the space facilitated discovery and play in a way that wasn’t about
hierarchy, linearity, goals and productivity. Working on this game sketch
also opened up a lot of interesting threads that I would love to further
develop such as how to now queer dialogue design, the idea of voyeurism and
restricted agency and mechanics that reflect ideas of queer failure and
non-linear temporalities.
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