Project Trailer

Introduction

Our final project is titled project IDLE.

It revolves around audiences on InstaLive following 4 different accounts : @idle.kitchen (Desmond), @idle.livingroom (Si Qi), @idle.bedroom (Melo) and @idle.studyroom (Kai Ting)

The premise is that four people are trapped in a kidnapper’s home and the home is burning down. With time running out, the players have to command these four people to find their respective keys in order to escape the house before it burns down.

Duration : 30mins

Location : IKEA Alexander Road

Number of players : ~10-12

 

The bedroom

Players will be able to command the hosts of that particular instagram account simple commands such as “Look under blanket” or “Look under lamp” in order to find clues as to where the key is or find the key itself.

The Living Room

The Test Run

Through the test run we sieved out major problems we had with our game such as the clues being too vague or the clues and the key being too difficult to spot.

We decided to use riddles as the biggest clue as if any of the users were able to guess the riddles they would immediately be able to find the location of the key. In order to prevent users from googling the riddles and finding out the answers we had to think of original riddles by ourselves. Some examples include:

Wanted by dusk, headless by dawn

Answer: Pillow

I help you when you want to see, but you wouldn’t want to look at me.

Answer : Lamp

Problems faced

We came across a multitude of problems from latency problems to connection problems. For example, the audience would only be able to see what we were seeing on our screens a minute later. Also, there was a point in which the host for the study room (Kai Ting) was unable to connect to the internet due to the poor connection in the IKEA building, and hence the account went offline for about a minute or so.

At the end of the day, everything played into our narrative. Kai Ting told the players that due to the rising smoke in the house she blacked out. Although unintended, this “glitch” allowed for us to instill a sense of panic and rush in our audience. It allowed them to understand that the game time is ending and that they should hurry to find the key.

Also, due to the lack of participants, we decided to “burn a room down”. Before the game began, the kitchen was already burned down and this allowed for only three playable rooms. This was done because there was an insufficient amount of players online, and, had we not done this, the game would not have been completed. In essence this was not the optimal way we would have wanted our game to be played, but at the same time, we would have wanted for a satisfying experience for our players as the game would otherwise have been rather difficult to complete.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, while many things did not go as according to plan, the game turned out well. What I have learned from this is the beauty of art and games in the third space; the allowance for mistakes and flaws in the implementation and execution of the quite literal game plan is what makes the game feel real and fun. While frustrating at times, at the end of the day the glitches and lag added to the experience which was live-stream gaming.

If I had one thing I would change or improve on in our project, it would be to have more players, bigger rooms and a more complex puzzle to solve. At certain times there were players who entered the room only to immediately find the key without having found any clues, and this brought a very abrupt end to the solving of the mystery of one of the rooms. This felt very anti-fun to me as there should be some form of progression for players before they are allowed to end the game like that. While it is intrinsic in the design of the game, having a time limit to the game also feels very restrictive to the fun that the game has to offer. Having to work under a time limit with little players meant that some of the clues would probably not have been found and hence, part of the fun of the game was completely undiscovered by the players.

Overall, it was a very positive experience that I had fun with which really taught me a lot about improvising on the spot as well as how glitches and imperfections in the execution of the game can add value to the experience that players get.