Our Game.Play.Design (course provided by AU) project. 

Controls 

(Play full screen and turn the sound on)

  • Space: Interact
  • Mouse/mousepad: look direction
  • Left click: shoot
  • WSAD: Move

//Hint: read the letter

General Game Concept 

Beyond the doorstep is a game in which you have to fight, the main character Evans agoraphobia in order to reach the goal. With focus on the game as a narrative, the game is all about telling the story of the anxiety, while feeling the intense pressure a person having an anxiety attack might feel.

The character Evan finds a letter from his partner Sammy, in which he is given an ultimatum. Evan must face his Agoraphobia in order to find and reconnect with Sammy. While Evan searches, he will meet and talk to friendly people who will help him find clues about Sammy's location. He will also get opportunities to unlock different clues and the backstory about why Sammy left, which also includes how he developed Agoraphobia and overall backstory about them and their relationship. Evan finds Sammy camping in a mountain forest where they have been waiting for Evan the entire time. Sammy had actually planned the entire journey for Evan with help from family and friends. They reconnect and live happily ever after.

Closure with exposure!

Game Design Canvas 

Mechanics, rules, Interaction Design

  • Because Evan needs to keep overcoming his anxiety attacks which can occur in various situations and spaces, he will keep developing new ways of coping. This means that the player has the choice of choosing between different  weapons before certain levels. The various choices should change from level to level. These levels interact with each other in an instantiating way as one level instantiating relation to another level, the presence of the first level causes the second level to also be present (Björk, S & Holopainen, J. 2003).
  • The monsters does not kill Evan, but tries to push him back inside his safespace, which relates to our theme, also we do not want the failure of dying, as our values are empowerment. 

Narrative, Stories

  • We chose the story of Evan having to find his partner, because he needed a strong enough motivation, to want to traverse the landscape of anxiety. This has to be understood as a helpful but firm and much needed last push out of the ‘birds nest’. 
  • We wanted to utilise embedded narrative as our main way of narration where the narrative is told and unfolded by the player as they go (Wei, 2010 p. 447). This could work in an interesting way with our unreliable narrator(Wikipedia, 2020), which Evan is. Anxiety has a way of distorting perception and reality, which we want to underline with our embedded narrative(Shaikh, 2018). The embedded narrative means that Evan picks up, unlocks and discovers parts of the story throughout the game, reinforced by agency, meaning that the player has a feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the world (Mateas and Stern, 2006). The clues he unlocks are sometimes clues left behind by Sammy or other pieces of information and sometimes the clues are heavily tainted by his state of mind, but the player does not know which one are real and which ones are exaggerated by anxiety. 

Player experience, Experience design

  • The experience that we want the players to have is both the experience of agoraphobia, but also the feeling of empowerment when defeating the anxiety-monsters. To create this player experience, we use embedded narrative and agency. We also use ilinx which causes disorientation, temporarily distorts perception, and is a very powerful way of creating anxiety, adrenaline and fear (Roger Caillois, 2006) and immersion which gives the feeling of being present in another place and engaged in the action therein (Mateas and Stern, 2006). Furthermore we use music to underscore and support our main characters emotions (Douek, 2013). The music starts playing when the avatar leaves the house which is his safe space in the game world and it helps to set the mood of the game along with the design inside the house and outside in the garden. 

Space, game worlds

  • The aesthetics of our game-world is very important. We’ve built it up around a cunning contrast between horror, darkness, and borderline surrealism, and soothing, beautiful, and calm colours and environments meant to give the player a sense of awe and joy. The contrast is important, because the world seems unfriendly and dangerous, but once the player has overcome their various anxiety attacks, they will be rewarded with a new view of the space they’re in. 

Theme, context

  • The context of our game is based on primarily the COVID-19 pandemic and the anxiety type called agoraphobia. Studies (World Health Organization regional office for Europe, 2020; Videnskab.dk, 2020; Massachusetts General Hospital, 2020; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020) show that the COVID-19 pandemic is causing anxiety and mental health issues. It can especially create the anxiety Agoraphobia. It is a type of anxiety where you fear and avoid places that can cause panic and make one feel trapped, helpless, and embarrassed (Kivi, Agoraphobia: Types, Causes, and Symptoms, 2012). People with agoraphobia often have symptoms of a panic attack and a rapid heartbeat when they find themselves in a stressful situation. The anxiety materialises as Agora-monsters in the game that Evan can only see, to portray that Agoraphobia exists only in the character's mind. These monsters push the player back as an anxiety attack would make a person with agoraphobia want to go back into the safe space.
  • Our main focus with our game is to create a feeling of success and accomplishment in our players through the use of exposure therapy (Kivi, Agoraphobia: Types, Causes, and Symptoms, 2012). The levels and fighting will look a tiny bit better each time the player defeats a level, as it is to portray how the anxiety gets smaller. 

Tools, tech, platform

  • The game concept could be implemented both as a 2d-side scroller, a third person 3d game. The important aspects to maintain are that, (1) it has to be visually impactful so the contrast between the horrifying distorted reality and the beautiful rediscovered real reality is strong. (2) The person should be able to see the small changes of progress that visibly improves the state of the character, meaning they should always be able to see the character, which leaves out the option of first-person and eventual VR. 

Postmortem

In the beginning of the process, we focused too much on “what are we able to make ourselves” rather than “what do we want the actual overall game concept to be?” If we had created the entire game concept first, we could have more easily chosen what we wanted from our prototype. Also, our backwards process meant we had a very vague idea of our concept when we started writing our theory, which complicated things further. 

References

Books/Texts in books

  • Wei, H. (2010) “Embedded Narrative in Game Design”. Canada:Simon Fraser University.
  • Mateas, M. & Stern, A. (2006). “Interaction and Narrative”. In Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (pp. 642-666). Cambridge: MIT Press.
  • Björk, S & Holopainen, J (2003) “Games and design Pattern” in In Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (p. 393 -416). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Online articles



More information
StatusPrototype
PlatformsHTML5
AuthorBravo6GoingDark
Made withUnity

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