Game Design
Vision Statement & Top-level summary
Back to the Future is a cooperative adventure game in which each player will take on a basic ability (physical or mental) to explore the map that symbolizes the mental world of an Alzheimer's patient named Racheal, where players need to collect supplies and ultimately help Racheal retrieve forgotten memories. The player's main goal is to find certain items hidden throughout the map, which contain Recheal’s memory fragment, to unlock four important forgotten memories. However, during the game, players will encounter various challenges representing Alzheimer's symptoms, such as monsters caused by hallucinations, and disorientation caused by memory incoherence, etc. Players need to cooperate with each other to overcome challenges in order to win the game.
Innovative
(a) Innovation
The game features Alzheimer’s disorientation experience that enable player to understand the symptoms and struggle of the Alzheimer’s disaesa from the patient’s perspective.
(b) Relevance
According to our research, Alzheimer's patients are a community that people can easily come into contact with in their daily life, 1 in 5 Canadians have experience caring for someone living with dementia that is caused by Alzheimer’s disease. And our game aims at providing opportunities for players to understand the experience and struggle of the Alzheimer’s patient to evoke empathy and sympathy for them.
(c) Selling points
Our game allow players to experience the symptoms and struggle of having Alzheimer’s disease from the patient’s perspective by using meaningful game mechanics and engaging narrative.
Core Game
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Unique
Players learn about Alzheimer’s through role-playing, exploration and cooperation. While most people know Alzheimer’s through news, online information or other people’s words, our game creates an immersive environment for players to simulate what Alzheimer’s patients actually go through. The experience of Alzheimer's disease in person is often better than the onlooker's perspective to understand the patient's pain.
Narrative/Story
Rachel is an old woman with Alzheimer’s disease who has forgotten most of her past memories. Even though Rachel was a doctor, she is helpless and hopeless to defeat her sickness since it’s incurable. When she was just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, she decided to record everything she could still remember in a notebook. But as time passes, Rachel’s condition is getting worse day by day, now she can no longer remember those things she recorded in the notebook.
Game mechanics
Game Setup:
Each player selects a colour in Tabletop Simulator and opens the drawer to see the character they will play. The starting point is the yellow tile in the middle. Shuffle player cards, resource cards, event cards, and hallucination cards separately. Then, set them aside. Mood points indicate the mental state of the player, and each player begins with 9 mood points. Place the mood token (rectangular) on number 9. Each player draws 2 action cards. The oldest player starts the game.
Gameplay procedures:
All players put their player pawns on the yellow tile and the oldest player goes first. Players go in clockwise order and do no more than four actions within their round. Players need to move to adjacent tiles to discover resources they need to unlock the treasures. Though it’s optional, they can play player cards during their turn to help them move faster or achieve their goal quicker. When they have gathered all the resources they need for a treasure, one player gathers all resources in his hand, moves onto the red treasure tile they want to unlock, then discards the cards and removes the treasure tile they opened.
Rules:
Each player's turn is divided into several parts. In every turn they can do 4 actions, but they can also decide not to use less actions. Each of the following is counted as 1 action: 1) move to an adjacent tile, 2) unlock the treasure box with required cards, and 3) exchange card(s) with one player on the same tile. If they land on any of the white, blue or green tiles, they need to draw a card from the pile with corresponding color. During their turn, they can play player cards but it is optional. When their turn end, they need to draw 1 yellow player card.
Play Matrix
Skill
Mental calculation
Physical dexterity
Skill and Chance are equally high in our game. In terms of skills, players need to strategize, communicate to use less turns and achieve objectives. In terms of chance, they need luck to land on resource tiles and draw cards that can bring a positive effect to them. Physical dexterity isn’t present in our game, but mental calculation is absolutely necessary because players may need to use their memory to remember the location of tiles and calculate mentally how they can spend their every step effectively.
Summary/Overall Reflection
This project gave us some insights into teamwork, game design, and transformative games.
For teamwork, we found that with a reasonable distribution of work, it was challenging for us to integrate the perspectives of each group member to ensure that everyone was involved in the design process and contributed to our game. In the designing process, a variety of online collaboration software ensured efficient teamwork, such as Discord, Miro, and Figma.
For the game design process, we gained a deeper understanding of the importance of playtesting. Playtesting allows us to observe our game through players' perspectives, so that helps us collect and analyze their feedback to adjust our game mechanics. We conducted playtesting with different groups during the class, and every playtest helped us improve the game mechanics and make the game more balanced. For example, during the first playtest, we could clearly observe that our game focused too much on the transformative but neglected the fun and playability of the game. Playtesting also provides more interactive and mutual learning experiences for the students. We also acted as playtesters to test other people's games, and in this process, we could learn from other groups' good experiences to help us critique and improve our games.
Finally, with transformative games, we learned that games are also a powerful medium for artistic expression beyond being a tool for entertainment. As a highly interactive art form, they enable conversations between game designers and players. Game designers can express their personal worldview and perspectives through game mechanics and themes. Players can immerse themselves in the game world built by the artist by playing the game, thus creating amazing spiritual and cognitive conversations. Designing a transformative game greatly opens up our minds and provides more possibilities for our future design works.