The Changes

My development cycle is coming to a close. So this week, I want to talk about one of the biggest changes that I made to Bound based on testing feedback. It was really important to me that players don't think that this is an experience that they can "beat." There is no escaping the the limitations that wearing a chest binder places on an individual. In early iterations of the game, this wasn't clear. Players wanted to go back to see if they could perform "better," which seemed to conflict with what I was trying to say through the game. I think part of this, admittedly, was due to the minigame configuration that overwhelmed and confused players with three meters. To more effectively communicate the controls, I used the genre conventions of a rhythm game. There was still the issue of curbing player expectations. So, I added beginning and end segments to the narrative.

To affirm that the player does end up in a situation that threatens their health, I presented the running minigame as a flashback. This flashback is triggered by the player character talking to a medical professional about what happened to them. To save on assets and time, this conversation happens over a black screen.  I attempted to create the atmosphere of a hospital through audio alone.

Similarly, the game needed closure or some form of an ending scene. I decided to bring the player back to that hospital environment. I took this opportunity to express some of my personal frustration with the healthcare system's lack of transgender education and empathy. It felt right to end the game with the doctor unable to understand the player character's perspective.

This change actually deeply informed the 2D art direction of the game. Because the main portion of the game is now situated as a flashback, I wanted the UI and menus to fit. The "sketchy" art style that I went with, to me, elicited the same energy as journal doodles. I went with white drawings on a black background to make the moments inside the hospital feel like the present.

I'm really proud of how this project has come along. While it isn't perfect, it does feel important.

The Sound

In my last post, I talked about my experience revisiting my middle school. Well, I didn't go there just for the sake of nostalgia. I wanted to do some "on location" recording to recreate the atmosphere as accurately as possible. I think more of it went wrong than right.

First of all, I do not have access to professional audio recording equipment. Nor do I have something that is designed for mobile recording. I have a laptop and a decent microphone. Before I actually attempted to do this, I thought that would be enough. In my mind, I thought, "Oh, I'll just bring the microphone onto the track to record footsteps. No big deal."

Hey, you know what's creepy for a grown man to do? Bring ANY kind of recording device to a grade school. (I just want to mention that I went on a weekend - there were no children or teachers.) You know the moment that I realized this? When a woman pulled into the parking lot to go and exercise on the track right after I got there. So, I spent the first forty minutes of my time there just waiting in my car, wondering if I should just go back home. Finally, she left and I was able to feel less self conscious. I bet there's security camera footage that now exists of me just holding a microphone up to the wind.

I couldn't bring my "setup" to the track because it was - you guessed it - raining. The one day I had to go there, it was raining. It was raining and there were violent winds. Each aggressive gust created nasty clipping sections in the tracks I was using to capture atmospheric samples. At least I could run in place next to my car and get half way decent footsteps. The raw footage required some serious remastering to become acceptable to throw into my game.

After the "business" part of my visit was over, I decided to jog a few laps. You know, just to see if it felt the same. It made me feel like I was in the sixth grade, trying to spike my hair with glue sticks again. The older you get, the easier it is to forget the small moments that created you. I urge anyone reading to reflect and see where it takes you... Hopefully it doesn't lead you to bring recording devices to a grade school.

The Location

This past week was the week of Thanksgiving. I think I gained five pounds in the culinary wasteland that is this period of time. Regardless, I enjoyed being home on Cape Cod with my family. I took this opportunity to go back to a location that's special to me. This is the place that I went to fifth and sixth grade. It had the very short and easy to articulate acronym of BHMCPS. Which, of course, stood for Barnstable Horace Mann Charter Public School. Since I studied there, they have changed the name to BUES or Barnstable United Elementary School. Probably for the best.

Middle school was an awkward time for me. I was the kid that everyone wanted to copy homework answers off of. I was also the kid that had friends in every social circle, not fitting into any one specifically. I was also a girl who dressed exclusively in men's clothes and had short hair. Some teachers had the audacity to ask me if I liked "girls" or "boys" better. Or if I wished that I was a boy. These questions always made me extremely uncomfortable and I never answered them. My gender expression became an oddity that even adults felt necessary to challenge.

This field and track was the first place where I was able to experiment with different pronouns and a male identity. I joined an after school lacrosse team where I was the only girl. All of the other kids on it were older and didn't know who I was. I was frequently read as male as a child, so naturally that's how they categorized me. Every practice they would address me with "he/him/his" pronouns and call me "Billy" (which my birth name sounds remarkably close to). I never corrected them because I felt so at home. This is why I'm choosing to recreate this location in "Bound." It was the first place where a repressed identity was validated and I engaged in physical activity.

The Metrics

Any good designer should be able to back up their decisions with data in a spreadsheet. In fact, designers who make decisions out of personal preference or spite are not designers at all - they're just creators or people with ideas. They're not refining something based on the needs of a particular audience. They're doing the equivalent of writing a journal entry. Which is fair - we all have our own methods of processing. But, why am I rambling on about what I consider to be good design practice? I recently put analytics into "Bound." This is the single most important thing a designer or developer can do in order to understand how their game is being received. In this post, I would like to touch on the different metrics that I'm tracking and why I chose to track them.

(Here I've used an image of the dashboard for a demo game - I don't want to make IRB mad at me for featuring my actual playtest data.)

First of all, the analytics SDK that I'm choosing to work with is GameAnalytics. Mostly because I've worked with it in a professional setting before. But, also because it's extremely easy to implement and has this fancy dashboard that you see above where I can look at usage data in real time. I'm mainly using it to track the amount of time players spend in different sectors of the game and what keys they press at what times. Each session will also record the minigame values that player was playing with and the player's ID so that I can pair their analytics data with their survey response.

Most of this information is to help me determine minigame difficulty. I know that, for example, if no players are pressing any of the breathe keys - they probably aren't noticing that there is a second prompt. Or, if the time they spend playing the minigame is only ten seconds, and they didn't press any keys, then players probably didn't understand the mechanics of the minigame. I m also tracking how much time players spend walking around the environment before the minigame. If players are spending too much time there, it may indicate that it is unclear where the player is supposed to go next, or there is something distracting about the environment.

I do have concerns about using GameAnalytics. The program itself is heavily geared towards tracking usage data. Things like daily active users, average FPS per play session, average play session length, etc. I only care about the custom events that I've created. I hope that it won't be a major pain in the ass to extract the data that I'm interested in. If not, I may just have to write my data directly to a .CSV file. The old fashioned way.

The Ugly

The image above is the very first iteration of the game's environment. It consists of all the Unity Store assets with the tag "school" or "parking" or "street" that I could find. I wanted to get a sense for scale and also see what was available to me in the form of free assets. I also needed a physical space to start implementing functionality that I had promised at the conception of the project. The game has only been in development for three weeks and I am the sole developer. On top of that, I'm not a conventional or classically trained artist. All things considered, this is perfectly acceptable. It's certainly functional and serves its purpose. It's not even what the final game is going to look like.

I'm embarrassed of it and I don't want to let anyone else touch it until I stop seeing how ugly it is. In game development, that really isn't an option. You have to test your game at every opportunity to make sure that it's conveying the right message, players aren't misinterpreting elements, and that it's engaging. So, I'm posting this heinous screenshot in an attempt to overcome the way that I'm feeling.

I think that I'm finding it really difficult to separate myself from this project. The content is so personal and delicate. I feel an immense amount of responsibility to represent the experience perfectly. To make something beautiful, stunning, and provocative. I don't feel like I'm living up to the standard that I set for myself and that feels supremely shitty.

Friday of this week is my first opportunity for official playtesting. Here's to tricking myself into feeling excitement, rather than feeling dread.

The Story

"Bound" is only designed to be a few minutes long, yet it tackles an intensely complex and emotional subject. I only have the amount of time it takes the player to navigate to the track to give context; to invest the player in the character that they're controlling. So, I put a limitation on myself of a maximum of ten lines of introductory dialogue. This is enough to convey what I need, but not so much where the player feels like experiencing it is a slog. After beating my face repeatedly against my keyboard, here's the content that I came up with.

1. "Do not under under any circumstances, wear for more than eight hours a day."
2. "Do not wear during strenuous physical activity."
3. That's what the package told me.
4. Then, later when I googled it, the internet told me the same thing.
5. So, I said "Fuck it!" and now I'm here. Where I went to middle school like... Eight years ago.
6. Wearing this binder that I'm not supposed to and running shoes that I haven't touched since I came out.
7. Everyday after lunch, I used to fly down this sidewalk and up those stairs to the track.
8. My friends were never able to catch up with me so they would just lean back on the chain link fence and watch. Flashing me a thumbs up when I blew by.
9. I want that again. So badly.

I got away with only nine lines of dialogue. Ha! Take that, past self! While this is NOT the final version of this text, I'm moderately happy with it at this stage of development. It conveys three important things to the player; the main character is wearing a binder, the main character "came out," the main character used to love running. My fear is that people who know nothing about the trans community will be totally lost. If you don't know what a binder is to a transguy, do the first four lines make the sixth line comprehensible? Will the player be able to infer that the main character "came out" as trans? Only playtesting will help me answer these questions. I do think these lines excel at showing the player the situation rather than telling them.

Once the dialogue is finalized, I plan to record and voice act them. I'm definitely not experienced in this way, but I have the authentic voice of a transman and can't afford to pay any professional talent. It's incredibly important to me that an underprivileged voice is featured.

The Mechanics

More about Bound.

I'm designing Bound as a first person walking simulator in Unity 2018. The player character is a transman, home from college for fall break. Desperate to get in decent shape, he's taken a trip back to his middle school to go jogging on their public track. Unfortunately, he's made the unhealthy decision to do this in a binder. The experience that I'm trying to replicate is divided into two parts: the introduction where the player navigates the character to the track and gets situational context through narration, and then a strenuous, key smashing mini-game while the character is actually running. My goal is to recreate the physical and mental stress that running in a binder causes through this mini-game. No matter how well the player performs, the game still concludes with the character passing out.

Building the mini-game.

Because the core of Bound is the running portion, I decided to dedicate my first week of development to whiteboxing it. As I move forward with this project, it's important to me that I'm representing a transgender experience as accurately and genuinely as possible. Spending extra time refining this mini-game will help me achieve that.

What's the premise?

The player must manage three different meters; speed, oxygen, and consciousness. The faster the character is running, the more quickly they run out of oxygen, and also the more quickly they begin to feel light headed. The game prompts the player with keys to press to maintain a steady pace and keys to press to take a deep breath. It's up to the player to press the correct keys as fast as they can, to keep the character conscious for as long as possible. It's important to note, there are no plans to give any sort of incentive for players to play again and see if they can "last longer" for a "higher score." That would send the wrong message and detract from the experience.

Why key smashing?

With the development time that I've allotted, I know that my feasible target platform is PC. This means that for player input, I'm constrained to a keyboard. Key smashing is the most physical activity that you can do with that input device. I thought that this would effectively communicate the feeling of running or physical activity to the player. 

The evolution.

This is what the original whitebox looked like. The pace keys were "W," "E," and "R" while the breathe keys were "B," "N," and "M." What was wrong here? Well, those keys aren't exactly intuitive. It would be ridiculous for me to assume that players have memorized all of the specific key locations on a keyboard. Not only that, but the key prompts were much too far away from the meters. The prompts require all of the players attention, affording them almost no time to notice the levels of each meter.

The next iteration was much more successful in terms of information accessibility. The player's focus is drawn directly to the center of the screen. The proximity of the key prompts and the meters makes it so the players know how they're performing. The color of the meters help differentiate them and associate them with what they are meant to represent. The pace and breathe keys had also been changed to the "WASD" and arrow keys, the most common control scheme used for movement in computer games. This meant that their locations are far more familiar. There was still one issue, though. The placement of the pace and breathe prompts were opposite of where a player would put their hands on the keyboard.

The current whitebox was amended to reflect the physical layout of the input device. Overall, this decreased the difficulty of the mini-game because players no longer had to account for the inverted mapping of the prompts.