My role

Working with my more technical buds, I drove creative direction and used my design thinking experience to build a new workshop format to steer the brainstorming, manage the flow of ideas, and ensure that all team members were actively involved. In the workshop, it was crucial to ensure we all felt encouraged to share our thoughts, feelings, and ideas freely, and that we examine and debate the idea to create something great.

Activity 1: Influences to Ideas

This exercise is designed to help us define what we want this game to be by examining what we enjoy playing and reflecting on work that has moved us. Each team member lists “influences” like previous works (games, movies, shows, books etc.) or concepts (situations, things, environments, feelings etc.) that capture particular aspects of what they want this game to be within 7 themes.

These themes are as follows:

• Feel: games, movies, music etc. that make you feel the way you want this game to feel.
• Story: What stories will influence this game? Fiction, non-fiction, scenes, whole books, general story themes, etc.
• Interaction: What mechanics or user flows from other video games have you seen that you want to explore?
• Characters: What characters from any kind of media do you like? Who was a compelling character in a show/movie/book/game you like?
• Physical Setting: What physical environments do you want present in this game?
• Situational Setting: What situations or events (fictional or real) impacted you on an emotional level that you want to convey in this game?
• Fun! What has made you just go "damn this is fun"?

Together, we then cluster the influences under each theme to point out major similarities and themes that help us better understand why these are the influences for our game. Then, as a group, we choose from these clusters to define our game through new ideas under each theme. These include (but are not limited to) short phrases to steer vision, elements of the game we want to build, and story points we want to include.

After we performed this exercise, we decided we wanted a story driven game with a main character. So we then started to build a “personality map” for our main character.

‍

Activity 2: Personality Mapping

It works like this:

We define our scenario, and through similar design thinking-style methods, we write down our ideas on notes under 4 categories for how our character reacts to this scenario.

The categories are as follows:

Given this personality map and our Influences to Ideas board, we chose the following as our main themes, and have begun work on building out the plot, mechanics, story progression, and main character.

For the sake of my teammates sanity and so we don't share too much, I will not screenshot the storyboard. However, we are starting big picture, using Dan Harmon's story circle as a device to build out the main points. This works really well for this kind of high level development because it provides us "atomic" story cues, and answers questions like "well, what does the story of the main character moving out of their comfort zone look like?"

Next Steps

These activities helped us solidify the "vibe" of our games world, mechanics, and main character. This is only the first step, but within a few hours, we were able to come up with starting point to move forward with a direction for what we, as a group, want this game to be. Next steps to act on this direction includes:

Deepening the Main Character

We plan to further explore the main character (depicted above thanks to MidJourney) and build out their backstory, goals, motivations, and their development over the course of the game. Additionally, we plan to consider how the main character's personality and actions will affect gameplay and story progression.

NPCs and Relationships

Who else lives in the town our game will be in? How do they react to the strange occurrences we defined? How do they interact with the main character?

Exploring the World

What locations can the player visit? What secrets can they uncover? We will begin mapping out the town, including the major locations the player can visit and the activities they can participate in.

Mechanics

During Ideation we uncovered few mechanics we'd like to include, such as a time loops, item use, and mystery-solving. Next, we will work through how these mechanics work in practice. How does the time loop affect gameplay? How do players collect and use items? How do they solve mysteries? TONS to think about!

Plot & Story

We will further develop our outlines into a full narrative arc. What are the major plot points? How does the story evolve? What decisions can players make, and how do these decisions affect the outcome of the story?
‍

Art & Sound

We're going to start working on what our game will look and sound like. Both art and sound contribute to the overall mood and atmosphere of the game, enhancing the themes we want to convey.
‍

Key Takeaways

Overall, this workshop served as a powerful testament to the benefits of collaborative creativity and diversity of thought among friends. It reinforced the importance of structure in guiding brainstorming sessions and showed how to manage and integrate diverse opinions and ideas effectively, and the exercises used in this workshop will undoubtedly serve as valuable tools in future sessions. I'm happy I get to spend this time with a group of people who really want to build something interesting and fun. It's been and will continue to be a great learning opportunity.