Lonely Island: My first attempt at creating an game based lesson. Here is my reflection. The game is also below for you to play!
Overwhelmed. That is the first thought I felt when considering what I wanted to cover in my first attempt at developing a game with educational overtones. The problem was, in my mind I had all these great ideas that I thought had potential to be incredible gaming components that also shared an economics lesson. I learned my first lesson right away. Compartmentalize all ideas first. Ideas seemed to be the easy part, and there was no shortage for me. As someone who has played different games growing up I had a lot of great background to draw from. I would lay in bed and idea after idea would come to me. Before I knew it I had a notebook full of scribbles that didn’t make any sense to anyone but me in the morning. The next lesson I learned was storyboard first! I attempted to design and write all at the same time. I know this was foolish right off the bat. I wanted to get use to the game design program Sploder so I just sat down and played with it for a couple hours. The problem was I was creating levels I enjoyed so I figured why not start writing the narrative to go along with these levels. After a couple levels the flow of the game and narrative was a little messy ( alot messy actually). So I started over, which is my 3rd lesson. Write down the aspect from your previous attempts that you enjoyed so when you start over the design and production flows a lot easier. Before I started the design again, I sat down with my economics textbook and created a lesson plan with the end goal first and based on the first chapters of an introduction to economics class. I thought about the concepts I wanted to share within the overarching story, and I thought about how to play those lessons into an interesting story. What I came out with was something I enjoyed with a playful sense of humor. Lesson number four for me was having fun in production and design transfers over to a fun game. When I would walk away after becoming frustrated or stepping back for a little bit, when I came back to the game I came back ready to have fun again, it didn’t seem like a project.
My story starts off with our protagonist free falling from the sky. The narrative explains quickly how to preform basic functions and what characters to avoid. In the first level, I wanted to create a quick level that introduces players to their health, enemies, and controls. I also wanted the first level to be narrative driven. One aspect that was difficult with designing the game was the placement of the text boxes did not allow for discussion, you would have to get creative in order to make that work. The back story was simple to digest since I want the focus to be about the lessons in economics that support the story. Essentially you read your “thoughts” in the text. Your thoughts are kind of like the voice inside your head explaining to what is going on and what you should be doing. After some quick platforming across a pristine lake , I introduce the player to hidden caves with collectibles. I wanted to give players that sense of exploration that hidden paths provide. Also I wanted to play on the psychology of wanting to collect collectibles. My inspiration for this came from Mario and sonics hidden paths where one up lives or massive coin scores were found. At the end of the level the player meets Wander John of North by SouthEast Westeros (ode to game of thrones haha) This interaction explains to the player they are on lonely island, and on this island there are four tribes that never interact because of the great distance. However, the tribes value Gold Coins as a currency or object to use for measurement to pay for goods and services. This is the first attempt at a mini lesson in economics. Students would draw the correlation between paper money and what Lonely Island uses Gold Coins for. It also allowed me to create a reason for players to collect gold coins. The wander finishes the discussion by explaining that if perhaps the right amount of gold coins were offered to a tribe they could tell the player how to leave Lonely Island. Another hidden lesson was within the framework of how far apart the tribes were. Students could begin to think about how the tribes could trade with a middleman to create wealth or establish some sort of logistics for them to connect. This idea would be planted during an in class activity were we discuss a similar situation with western colonial settlers and eastern colonial settlers using middleman and trading to create wealth across the American Frontier.
The second world has three levels within it and take the player on a journey through more economics concepts such as opportunity cost and specifically shortages and surpluses. The game play also begins to pick up in the second world. I introduce a variety of different obstacles. Since I was under a time limit to produce the game, I was able to explore the different variations within Sploder who offer a surprising amount of substance to build a level. Based on our class reading and theory variation was an important aspect for me to cover, however I also wanted to sell the narrative since that is where the educational lesson came in. What I found at the end was perhaps I included too much narrative in a short space given my level design. This is something I can work on as I increase the size of my levels given more time for development.
Something I wish I could have added to this particular game, that was included in my mash up theory which can be found here:
I really wanted to create a game experience for the player that allowed for freedom after scripting their experience for the beginning stages( or lesson). The game and game design I choose was difficult for me to add freedom or even script freedom in for the player where it felt natural. This just was not the game type to try and do that, so instead I focused on a short narrative driven experience where the writing was somewhat humorous (my humor is rather dry and I find children’s jokes hilarious, I assume most people are not like me haha).
In conclusion, I came away from this project with a new found respect for the patience game designers and even instructional designers must have. I also have new found respect for both designers ability to create a strategy for execution in long term goals. I found working backwards after I knew what I wanted the end goal to be, as a more efficient process when creating the rest of the lesson. Here is the link: Lonely Island
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