Project #7 Bitmap Game
Game of Life
Use keyboard keys: up, down, left, right
This is the game of my life where every scene details the hoops and challenges I have had to overcome and face in order to set myself on the track and direction of the life I want to live. Scene 1 shows all the challenging obstacles that I as a lesbian Lebanese woman have to face in society: overcoming homophobia, the patriarchy, societal expectations, and in my culture the added burden of marriage. In addition to all of these, in order to have a decent and free life, I have also had to overcome physical borders, and mental borders that chain me to a specific place or idea. Scene 2: I have set myself on a journey to become borderless, detached of place, practice, and a set way of being. In order to become borderless and free, I have to fight off all the imposed ways in which society and policy tend to frame me, box me into one thing or the other, make me smaller than I feel or know I can become. Here I am dodging all impositions that are forced on me. And finally, in Scene 3, I arrive at a place where I am reaping the rewards of overcoming the demanding nature of our world, and that to me is reflected in gaining money and power to become untouchable in my difference.
GAME SCENES
Design Process
Game feel & tone
I wanted the game to have a humorous tone to harness that power and get at the ridiculous structures built to face certain communities.
Using coin to represent making money as a way to portray gain and overcoming power dynamics.
Game breakdown
First Screen/Screen 1
Main character moves horizontally across the screen, through using the up and down arrows to avoid/overcome obstacles. Main character faces these obstacles: Patriarchy obstacle, Homophobia obstacle, Capitalism obstacle , Passport limitations obstacle , Marriage expectations , Society judgement, and collects coin at the same time. At the end Player moves to Screen 2.
Middle Screen/Screen 2
Character appears in screen 2. Incentives scattered around the canvas Display time in seconds = 60 seconds Character dodges objects coming at them, by going up & down and horizontally, making them disappear by deleting the objects or changing the alpha for 60 seconds The character would be avoiding by going up & down and horizontally Then Player moves to screen 3 / If they get hit but obstacles they would lose 1 life
End Screen/ Screen 3
Money moving vertically across the screen. Player collecting as much money as they can. By the end of the collection, total collected is displayed. 'You won' pops up
Reflection
I was excited to begin working on this project, and found the prompt exciting: translating my life/story into a game. I found that I define myself not by the chains that hold me back but by how I overcome them. So I decided to create a game about “overcoming”. After sketching out the scenes and then beginning to transfer them to code made it clear that the scenes could each be a game on their own, and that each could be broken down into multiple scenes. However, I wanted to still depict these 3 scenes because they contain a narrative arc, a beginning, middle and end. Throughout the process of coding, there were things I was so excited to incorporate in the game and design but lacked the time and expertise to accomplish in time. Working on this game made me excited about gamifying social and economic issues in order to make them more apparent and in order to dissect them and address them in new ways.