The final project for the Game Design Module was pitched to us with a theme- Impulse. The theme "Impulse" was either related to its meaning in physics or psychology.
Ideation Phase
Our team decided to go with the psychological meaning of "Impulse" which loosely translates to powerful, irrational urge or desire to respond. Our group had a discussion on how to take it forward. After the discussion we came into the conclusion on coming up with an ideas/stories about "hostage situation". My teammate Prithvi suggested that we all come up with stories which makes the player make impulse decision based on limited choice or a time restricted decisions.
After few weeks before our final game design presentation exam,(as it was winter break) our teammates connected back to discuss and finalise the narratives of the game. As we were three people(including myself) in the group, we came up with a narrative each. Prithvi came up with a fictional narrative based on a true incident of terrorist attack, that happened in the Moscow theatre, Russia 2002. While my other teammate Omer, came up with a fictional airplane hostage situation where the passenger negotiates with the terrorist.
I came up with a more philosophical - fictional narrative which revolved around a person being held hostage by their own mind and the impulse they would go through in their day-to-day life. My story was inspired by an article in read online- Life with PTSD: held hostage by my mind(Words by Ayman Alhussein) on how he escaped his country Syria and relocated to the UK as a refugee. Even though he was in much safe space where he could breathe with out any fear, but his past life haunted him back which caused post-traumatic stress disorder.
I just took his inspiration and created a narrative-choice based story about how we grow up and everything is decided by our parents until we are teens, where we are indecisive. I took the main character/player as a girl struggling to decide between choosing her subjects for college(dedicated to my beloved sister in heaven- Anushka).
After are these three narratives were finalised within the team, we tried to discuss more about the game mechanic and how are we going to take it forward. As we as a narrative focused game, we thought it was fair enough to have a choice based situation where the player need to decide between different options per situation. This would affect the player's journey in the story, including time-based option, story selection etc. More game design process on how we built these stories would be updated on the next blog.
.....to be continued
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