Intoxication Escape:
Why “this” game?
One night I was out with my friends and one of them was mentioning how embarrassing it was when they felt like they had to much to drink and felt like they needed to throw up. They mentioned how they always try to be very casual and just head to the bathroom to up chuck. The next morning I thought about what I could do with a situation like that. It would be cool to have to dodge through a party without alerting everyone to your embarrassing situation.
Initial Concept:
The initial concept was to have a multi floored house with multiple rooms. The goal of the game would be less to avoid people because they may become aware of you but more to beat the clock. Each level of the final version of the game would have a distance to cover and a time to cover that distance in. The high score would be calculated from a weighted combination of distance and time remaining at the end of the level.
I also wanted the game to be a first person perspective so the player could really get the feeling of being drunk. To achieve this I wanted to have the player wobble when they moved right or left and have blurred vision.
I started by implementing the classic first person controller with its full range of motion. I was able to apply a fisheye, fog and blur effect to the camera to achieve the vision I wanted the player to have. Having the full range of motion with all these effects became very nauseating. At this point I decided to restrict the player’s ability to move to just the left right arrows. This meant that having a time trial type game didn’t make complete sense. I would need to find another angle to make the game fun and interesting.
Second Version:
In this version the player only had the ability to make lateral movements. This means that I would be forcing the player forward. After talking with some people I settled on implementing a reputation system. Because the party would be filled with people anyway I made it the goal to try and avoid people and maintain a good reputation. I left the time component in because it is still possible to get stuck and run out of time before reaching the goal.
One feature I implemented to really accentuate this new goal include a sound affect whenever you bump into someone. Another is when you reputation is very low all the NPC’s in the room turn to look at you which is meant to really put forth the self conscious feeling the player should have at this point. Upon completing the level the player is given their “grade”, a sentence or two about what they have accomplished socially. At the beginning of the game right before the player begins making their way to the bathroom they hear their thoughts vocalized and the end of this train of thought is: “I hope no one can tell I can’t hold my liquor.”, to indicate this goal.
I didn’t have enough time to add in little snippets of sound to make the player feel even more self conscious if their reputation meter is low. I wanted to have it feel like the NPC’s were talking about the player.
Can be found: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~avimatt/IntoxicatedEscape/