Interactive Narrative Games
Project Overview
Scourge is an action-packed survival game that plays around with the concepts of man or woman vs. the world and being a savior. This Game Design Document (GDD) was a group project featuring: Jamani Allison, Jordan Klein, and Colston Gertz.
Jamani Allison is our group member who has developed the idea for Scourge.
My Contributions
For this project, I led our group to create the GDD. Along with being the project lead, I've also hosted meetings with my group members and handled feedback. Some sections that I've specifically contributed to was the Gameplay, Game Flow, Components/Assets, and Personnel/Costs.
Project Background
This GDD project is different from the previous one that I've done for Digital Rhetoric that I featured in the Retro Realm Game Ethics Magazine. Instead, we worked in teams to develop a document conceptualizing a game that fills a gap, solves, a problem, or addresses a need. In this case, we wanted to break the savior idea that we have when comes to man or woman vs. the world. The game uses the principles of game design covered in Schell's Art of Game Design to create an experience that addresses our issues in an engaging way.
Along with the document, we've included an annotated bibliography detailing our search into our team's gap. This gives context for our readers to understand the issue we've chosen and why it's important. Additionally, we address those needs in our document.
Project Goals
- Conceptualize a game that fills a gap, solves a problem, or addresses a need.
- Use the principles of game design covered in Schell's Art of Game Design.
- Use game examples examined in class as inspiration.
Method
Before we started, we had a kick-off meeting that I led. Essentially the first meeting was group introductions and talking about our individual pitches for the game concepts we had. After talking, we were particularly interested in Allison's idea because we were all into zombie survival games. I personally liked CoD Zombies and the Left 4 Dead series.
After this meeting, we saw the entire concept that Allison developed more in-depth. I gave feedback and recommendations to him and began choosing one of the two GDD templates available to us to use. I've chosen the second template because it focused more on the plot and gameplay. Especially since a name wasn't decided until later, we all felt as though this was a great starting point for a game concept. We've also designated sections amongst ourselves once we've had a second meeting.
After working on the project for a while, I realized that we didn't have a name or motto for our game. Me and Gertz came up with the idea of naming the game Scourge. We decided on this name because its meaning was significant to our story- to cause pain and suffering to others. So, since our main focus of Scourge was to infect and kill uninfected humans, we figured that this name fits best.
As for the motto, I've read Allison's section for the Introduction and decided to keep it short and simple: "You are not tainted".
Key Takeaways
Overall, this was a difficult project, not because of time constraints but working with group members. With only about a week, it was difficult to get people together for a meeting over the summer along with other factors. However, we managed to overcome most of this difficulty by creating session notes after each meeting and keeping each other updated on Discord about our individual progress.
If given the chance, I would love to go more in-depth to conceptualize Scourge with the other GDD template!