This week we started working on our second group task - a digital game prototype of Personal hygiene.
Firstly, we decided to make a silly game that was played just for fun. So we started to think of what is personal hygiene. I went on the internet and found the aspects of personal hygiene. For example, dental, body, hand washing, and nails. Then, we extend these topics, for dental hygiene, we can make teeth brushing, and teeth surgery and for the body, we can make body wash. Suddenly, I came up with an idea for a two-player game where one represents the good side, and keep brushing a kid's teeth and the other player represents the evil side and keeps letting the kid eat candies. So we discussed this idea and all think we can develop it further.
After a few days, I remembered a fun game that I played a few years ago(as shown below). It's called 'Eat Fatty', this is a two-player game and the main game mechanic is to stick the food on the ground and feed it into the other player's mouth. When one player is too fat and explodes, the game is over.
I then modified the initial idea. Instead of eating good foods, we can make the kid eat other stuff which is good for the teeth such as toothpaste and mouthwash liquid. The same for the other player, they can let the kid eat things like steel wool, dish soap, and rags. Quickly pushing this idea, I drew a sketch about the kid(as shown below) and how this game works. For this type of game, I imagined the art style of board cutting, nails are used to connect the body parts. By doing this, the game can look more ridiculous. Instead of using two separate player interfaces, it would be wiser to use the kid's own hands.
One of the team members made an initial prototype to check whether this mechanic works. With only a few abstract shapes, we can have a quick review of how the game works. It is always wise to try to make paper or digital prototypes before start making the game. Once starting all the arts and programming, we will feel it's difficult to change the game anymore.
After seeing the digital simple prototype, I found that it is totally not the same as I imagined before and I felt a little discouraged. We kind of stuck in a bottleneck, I don't know whether we need to change the game or add new interesting ideas to that. There is only one week to the submission, we need to hurry up and decided what to do next.
Now, I realized that ideas are always changing and it is wrong to be stuck to one specific idea. In a previous tutorial, I saw the sentence 'ideas are cheap' and now I have a better understanding. Only when all ideas and imaginations are made real, then it is a good result.
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