The portfolio video submitted as an individual file showed several complete go-throughs of the game with different endings, while this video below displays the structure of the game’s working flow:
Basic Profile
The game is named “Fertility, Crime, and Economy”. It is a rogue-like game in which the players can approve or reject random different policies to change the data and people’s lives. The players’ aim is to keep the birth rate above the red line and the crime rate below the red line. Failing to keep proper rates or finishing all the policies will lead to different endings. While dealing with the policies, the players can check the current data in line graphs, as well as new events happening to people and news of the whole society.
There are hints in the menu scene as well as animation of the clickable objects as a simple onboarding and tutorialisation.
The games Reigns, Plague Inc., Paper, Please!, and Beholder, as well as the movie, The Handmaid’s Tale, are referenced.
Numerical design is mainly based on structural functionalism in sociology.
For some of the policies, news and people’s stories, materials are drawn from real happened events.
Things that were planned to finish but finally left for further improvement
1. The localization part is designed for the players to be able to change anytime while playing the game, but due to the time limit, we didn’t finish the controlling part. The texts of the English version need polishment as well, to decrease grammar problems and to embed them better in the western culture.
2. Some of the policies are designed to have logical relationships except the random choosing. For example, only if the player chooses to fund the development of artificial reproduction, it is possible to promote the general use of artificial wombs later after a piece of news saying “Artificial Wombs are Coming!”. Besides, these logical relationships relate to other two endings that once arranged, in which the players will separately achieve a high technology government than can produce human babies without women’s uterus, as well as a high centralization government applying repressive rules to citizens.
3. Adjust the positions of several sprites and texts to make them in good composing.
4. Literature reference, including real happened events in comparison to those events in-game, as well as supported academic theories, of the game, is planned to be added in the menu scene for the players to click and check.
Reference
Durkheim, É. Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897). (Chinese version) Giddens, A. Introduction to Sociology (1991). (Chinese version) Parsons, T. The Structure of Social Action (1937). (Chinese version) Mills, C.W. The Sociological Imagination (1959). (Chinese version) Herbert Spencer’s theory of population.
Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows (2022) Politico. Accessible at: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473
America’s Abortion Quandary (2022) Pew Research Center. Accessible at: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abortion-quandary/
Valenti, J. Abortion by wire coat hanger is not a thing of the past in America. (2017) The Guardian. Accessible at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/15/wire-coat-hanger-abortion-stories-united-states
Abortion rights march: Thousands attend rallies across US. (2021) BBC. Accessible at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-58774262
Ashworth, P. Statistics show decline in marriage rates, and increase in age at marriage. (2022). Church Times. Accessible at: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/27-may3-june/news/uk/statistics-show-decline-in-marriage-rates-and-increase-in-age-at-marriage
WION. Gravitas: Artificial wombs are coming! (2022) Accessible at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V58tbHAaJNM
Shanti, D. ‘We were human beings’: UK families seek apology over historic forced adoptions (2022) Accessible at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/mar/20/we-were-human-beings-uk-families-seek-apology-over-historic-forced-adoptions
Stern, S.W. America’s Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually Immoral (2019) Accessible at: https://www.history.com/news/chamberlain-kahn-act-std-venereal-disease-imprisonment-women#:~:text=Under%20the%20’American%20Plan%2C’,for%20no%20reason%20at%20all.&text=Images%2FGetty%20Images-,Under%20the%20’American%20Plan%2C’%20women%20could%20be%20detained%20for,for%20no%20reason%20at%20all.
WIKIPEDIA. Family planning policies of China. Accessible at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_policies_of_China
Davidson, H. China divorces drop 70% after controversial ‘cooling off’ law (2021) Accessible at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/18/china-divorces-drop-70-after-controversial-cooling-off-law
BBC NEWS. Peru forced sterilisations case reaches key stage (2021) Accessible at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-56201575
Rivard, L. America’s Hidden History: The Eugenics Movement (2014) Accessible at: https://www.nature.com/scitable/forums/genetics-generation/america-s-hidden-history-the-eugenics-movement-123919444/
At the start of this May, There was a piece of news spread and soon got discussed worldwide, saying the victory of Roe v. Wade in 1973 might be overruled by the supreme court of the U.S.A., which means American women may lose their abortion rights in the future.
This, combined with the recent policies published in China to highly encourage each family to have three children, with some arguments to wish women to go back to the family from career, structured the initial inspiration of me and Xintong Ye.
As females, we usually have our fear and anger toward these policies, proposals, and the thoughts behind them. But what we would like to do with this game (we discussed and both agreed with that) is not complain or criticise, but to ask how can we the human beings make things better and sustainable, and try to build a social model to discuss different possibilities about the future of the society, with the situation of focus specifically on the birth rate.
This is a game with a political lens. By making this game, I was also trying to apply my sociology and anthropology backgrounds to games design.
Critical Reflection
The message of the game
While writing my research paper, I kept thinking about what players would get as a “message” from our game. It is very possible for me that they think of something other than what we would like to deliver, as the real message we have for the game is general and more a question than a piece of exact information to be expressed. I assumed some of them might regard the Tech Ending as a good one while the Revolution Ending as something bad, then draw a conclusion that the designers are trying to tell the others the best things to increase the birth rate is to develop new technologies and build a new structure for human society. In consideration of that, I planned to ask all the playtesters what message they thought the game is containing to verify my conjecture. Unfortunately, two endings had been cut due to time management problems which caused some change on what can be actually delivered to the players, also we don’t have enough time to arrange playtesting with multiple players at last. But the only player who tried our final version mentioned he thought the game was trying to talk about the topic of balance in managing human society, which was, amazingly, not that far away from the message we were trying to display.
Besides, I also realised game-making might be beneficial to academics in the field of social sciences as well, as they can build a social model in a game, let the players play a certain role, and see what the players’ choices are to check and improve their theories.
Sometimes it’s hard to control the workload and cut some brilliant ideas, especially if the designers are holding a strong wish to deliver a message through it. For me, it touches on one of the core concepts of games design- to find the best proper way to express, show, or give guides, with a game, on a suitable scale and let it make sense. That’s what I’ll take my life learning about.
The project management
As we believed we knew each other’s thoughts and abilities very well, we didn’t manage to have a periodic meeting but only discussed whenever we think we need to, which was inadvisable. We did not realize we had some misunderstandings about each other’s ideas until seeing some of the half-finished works, and it caused a mess at the end few days. These will not happen in our further collaboration or my own project management with the others.
The gameitself
1. The game mechanic
The biggest problem with our current game is the lack of interaction while the main content is long paragraph texts which can be boring and stiff. Although we’ve tried to improve it with different methods, such as localization to reduce reading problems, adding in-game character dialogue to make it funnier, etc., the fundamental thing is the mechanic of the gameplay. If we process it again, different prototypes in delivering the same message will be tried and playtested, to find an effective as well as interesting enough way for the gameplay before moving on.
2. The numerical logic
Due to the deficient quantity of the policy proposals, as well as the weak rationality of the numerical logic, the feedback of the line graphs shows a kind of haste and is not completed successfully simulating a running society with the social model that has been raised as mentioned in the AimsIt might bring some improvement if applying more controlling rules or even pre-settled paths. Things should be much more better if we can find a professional economist to join us.
3. Line graph drawing
For drawing the line graphs, linear functions were applied. For example, the initial birth rate is y = (-0.02)x + 1, and if the players approve a proposal to apply a policy limiting the freedom of abortions, the function will be changed to y = (-0.02+0.005)x +1. That is a convenient way for a short-term game-making project, though, a finer numerical plan could be applied in further development, as the influences of policies should be varied at different time spots after they are brought into force, furthermore, different policies that apply at a similar time could influence each other and bring a more complex result.
The function that we used to control the Birth Rate Line Graph, which is a linear function of one variable
4. Limitation on players’ choices
As there is no limitation with approving a policy, for instance, the government’s financial situation, the players can easily pass only those which could make effects while not disobeying morality, like funding new research on relevant technologies. But the strategic content could be more playable if the players, except controlling the birth rate and crime rate in a certain range, also have to approve some immoral policies to improve the government’s tax income for raising funds to approve a better policy.
5. Localisation
During processing localisation, I realised localising this kind of game is never limited to simple translation. Different political cultures surround people living in different countries. People’s identifications, their attitudes toward their government, as well as the current social situation of the countries, are not the same too. All of these should also be considered and arranged accordingly in localising games.
In localising this game, I tried my best to execute this. For example, in the detailed content of the policy “Equal Rights”, I wrote “Introducing a package of policies to support equality and promote equal pay and equal working right for all genders.” But in the corresponding Chinese version, my description changed to “Introducing a package of policies to support equality and promote equal pay and equal working right between men and women.” Because in the context of Chinese, the legal rights of gender minorities have not yet been guaranteed officially, and there won’t be a phrase like “all genders” appearing in a written document from the government. Similar changes in the usage of phrases were also applied to fit the exact situations, such as “general practitioners” to “departments under hospitals” or “march demonstration” to “sit-in”. But these were not big problems. The hardest contents were those relating to the political and economic system. Something may not be possible to happen under one system while in the other one it is probably the daily routine. I had to try to avoid this kind of content in designing policies.
For the reason above, as English is not my mother language also I’m not 100% familiar with western culture, except for grammar issues, there could also be cultural issues left in the game which may make the players confusing. In the future in making games with heavy texts, if possible, a native speaker should be found for polishing and improving the content to avoid these problems.
6. Feedback especially regarding policies
In the real world, a policy’s influence will not show up immediately. In simulating games, this situation should not be changed as well. But that causes a problem, in which the players can not get seasonable feedback after they do something. Multiple ways have been applied to try to give the players rewards to let it seems to be more relative to what they have done, such as shortening the time between policies dealing and the new pieces of news and people’s stories appearing, and containing the same keywords to build a stronger connection. But still, there might be some other ways which are more effective to let the players realise the relationships between the actions and the rewards, and there should be more striking ways to show the feedback which could also benefit building the relationships.
7. The two different visual styles
The two visual styles that we made Left: the later one; Right: the first one
Although we had to move the game to the later scene because of that accident, both of us, as well as all of our playtesters, prefer the first developed one with a screen as its background board. For the reason that screens allow more possibility of interactions than paper, thus it can be more playable and the players can get better involved. For example, according to our initial plan, there should be a huge map settled in the background and the players click on the new appearing glowing spots on the map to check the emerging news and people’s stories. In addition, real-time feedback matches better on a digital screen as well. The line graphs can be made continuously growing over time if they are shown on a screen, but on paper, it can be weird. Besides, a whole screen looks tidier than a mess of paper, and from my observation, people can tolerate more complex content on a screen than those on some paper, also a glowing object in darkness is more obvious than an average illumination, all of which listed above can help the players concentrate more into the game and less easy to make them feel boring.
8. Subjective content
It’s hard to say whether it can be improved, but the fact is, though we tried our best to avoid unconscious bias by researching sociological and historical literature, it was inevitable that some of our unverified thoughts were added indirectly and thus brought some less rigorous content.
9. Future development
During the whole process of making the game, we had discussed loads of the things which “can be added if there’s more time”, for instance, showing the whole life storylines in the forms of important events of the individual people as time goes by, to let the players see how their policies have influenced the NPCs whole lives, as well as some Easter eggs, like “someone has found his losing son from the city news”, to make the people stories more abundant and lively. Another instance is an achieving system. We even arranged the content of each achievement and the visual style of the panel. Indeed, these could improve our game in the future, but we might have spent too much time thinking about the after stuff, while the current stuff was paid less attention. Within the time constraints, how to refine what is already there, and polish it better at the scale that it already has, it’s more needed to be given priority.
This game is processed in collaboration. Our division of work is listed below:
Xintong Ye: art style, all visual and audio resources, scene building.
Yang Hong: logic structure, numerical design, copywriting, coding.
Concepts and game mechanics are discussed together by the two people.
Using Unity as the game-making engine and Plastic SCM as well as google sheets to collaborate.
A screenshot before one time I was about to check in changesThe different tabs that we built to help categorise the documents
Work is divided into tasks with a deadline in Google Excel as well. Discussions and meetings are arranged while needed.
Progress, playtests, and meetings
27/04/2022
Discussed the largeness of the game. Voted down the idea that providing several choices regarding real eras or areas, for controlling the workload as well as avoiding bringing subjective prejudgment towards actual countries or cultures into the game.
Initially decided which contents to contain and how to make them playable whilst combining well with each other.
The draft of the visual panel
01/05/2022
Searched for the real historical events as references, as well as sociology literature in helping build the model.
04/05/2022
1. Discussed the initial birth rate and the players’ target, if it is to make the birth rate increase or just not let it decrease too low. The latter was chosen as it’s better to be recognised.
2. Discussed whether to add a money system to completely change the game mechanic, in dealing with the current problem that the players can keep clicking on the “approve” or “reject” button without thinking anything if they would like to. An achievement system was raised up as well, left for later to see if we have time to do it.
3. Five endings were decided. They are “riot”, “new technology”, “high power government”, “go back to the history” and “the player did nothing”.
4. Both agreed and decided to make a flat background sound without any tune to help build the feeling of the surrounding.
5. Discussed whether to add a UI function bar on the top of the main UI. A menu scene was finally decided instead, for showing the pure playing scene without too much distraction.
The place where we once thought to add a UI function bar
13/05/2022 – Playtest 1
1. The three tabs of line graphs were complaint be hard to click. A paratactic design might be applied after discussion with Xintong.
2. The glowing spots on the map were not that obvious to successfully call clicks from all the players.
3. Several playtesters mentioned the gameplay mode made them recall the games Papers Please and the Reigns. We referred Papers Please before, but hadn’t looked into the Reigns. A try to the Reigns was added to our plan.
4. One of the playtesters left a comment, “Looks like the game is trying to make the world better. It is interesting, although the main interesting thing is those outside the game mechanic.” I thought he was right. We should try more to improve our game mechanics, and not be satisfied with the “interesting content”.
25/05/2022 – Playtest 2
1. Text was too hard to read. There was too much text on the same page and the players might not have the patience to read them over.
2. A display problem with the font was found. The text looked vague in the Unity playing window.
3. Maddy and David suggested that if the detailed text of the news is not important, then it was better to make it just lines or even remove it. The advice was accepted.
4. The news looked not that like news. A newspaper look might be applied to make more sense.
5. The current scale of the line graphs was too small and thus could not cause the players’ attention and looked more like decorations. Planned to make it able to be clicked to enlarge later.
27/05/2022
1. Discussed and adjusted the composing of modules as well as the visual style, decided to change it from plate 2D to 2.5D or 3D with new elements added.
2. Discussed how to deliver the achievement: tube and little sculpture (birds on sticks) or electric clock (8 bit).
3. Discussed how to show the growing line with limited space on the graph. Xintong raised we could make it shrink at the x-axis as time goes by. Don’t know how to realise with code yet.
4. In every round, there will be random policies, and the players may not survive to be able to play through all of the policies, so it can be said that there are rogue-like elements in our game. Then it should be important to give a summary for the players after each time playing through the game. Also, it should be better if the players can check the former rounds’ data. But that involved storing data locally and I’m afraid I don’t have time to learn.
30/05/2022
Different visual styles that have been raised by Xintong
1. New scene panels were brought forward. The one on the right side in the picture above was finally chosen, as the elements were more concentrated and it was more readable for the players.
2. In responding to the text problem raised on 25/05 Playtest 2, policies were divided into three pages, the title page, the background page and the method page.
3. Discussed how to solve the problem that the policies, which are the main playing objects, are also the most boring things in the game with long formal text. A function to let the players be able to make annotation was raised but voted down as we can’t give proper feedback to an annotation. Localisation to avoid some language barrier, as well as some funny self-talking by the character that the players are controlling to highlight some main information and call the players’ interest, have been finally decided added.
4. Discussed whether to make a tutorialisation at the beginning. Finally, we decided to use indirect hints as guidance and check if they work in the later playtests.
01/06/2022
1. Initially set up a localisation system allowing players to choose between English and Chinese.
2. An animation of a file being thrown onto the working place from outside of the scene was accidentally made, sooner I realised it can be a guide to encourage the player to click it at the beginning. A mini discussion was later held in which we decided to keep that animation. Further polished work was handed over to Xintong.
3. We realized working in the same scene at the same time on Plastic CSM can be dangerous as changes may conflict and some may be lost because of that. We decided to check with each other every time to avoid that happening.
01/06/2022 – Playtest 3
1. There was one playtester who didn’t notice the animation of the files.
2. All the playtesters firstly caught attention by the huge glowing back screen, and then the glowing electric clock. Glowing objects were much easier to get the players’ sight.
3. Several players reported that they did have a feeling of checking official documents. But the surrounding didn’t make them feel like working as a chairman with huge power, but more like a poor guy being put in a dark room to do a room escape.
4. One of our colleagues raised some advice, mentioning that we can add some change to the character’s working place along with the game going through, to make the players get better feedback as well as realise the years passing by.
5. It was hard to avoid the others onlooking while a playtester was testing, which might influence the effects while the others begin to playtest.
6. After playtesting, while discussing feedback 3, we realised there was a conflict between Xintong and me. She thought the character that the players were controlling was a clerk without a huge power, more like that in Papers Please, while in my imagination, the character’s power was similar to an administrator, more like that in Reigns. We discussed that and finally decided it influenced not severe and we can leave this to the players.
One of the playtesters is testing
04/06/2022
Brought up a more interesting idea about the game mechanics: to give the players different phrases and let the players combine them by themselves to produce policies. For example, [forcing]/[encouraging]/[banning]/[launching] + [women]/[pregnants women]/[single mothers]/[bachelors] + [seeking professional development]/[abortion]/[paying more taxes]/[getting married].
Discussed if a government tax income could be added into the game as “the money that can be used”, as a new mechanic to let the players think about the strategy, also as a limit to prevent the players from clicking “approve” or “reject” without reading anything and quickly going through the whole game.
Both ideas were finally abandoned for now because of the time limit and left for further development after the submission.
12/06/2022
1. The requirement of using different fonts for different languages has been reached by using Fallback List adding to the default language. It was not the most steady solution. Also, there were a few words that could not be displayed normally, with the Console Warning Line saying “can not find the relevant word in all fallback font assets”, while there should be those words there. A more steady solution should be found later if there’s time left.
A font with pure Chinese characters has been added to the Fallback List
2. A new scene with the same structure but different textures as well as the back screen was raised by Xintong, in consideration of the “feeling” issue mentioned by several players in Playtest 3.
3. Multiple empty objects were used to detect clicking. The positions have been adjusted during testings to remove the influences by the visual angle as well as the 3D ray.
The empty object in the scene
16/06/2022
1. Tried to use constructors to store different properties of the policies, later found it’s hard to be called as an entirety. The definition of List was finally applied.
The properties of the policies were defined one by one
17/06/2022
1. Solved the problem “the cursors show not the same on different PCs”.
2. In responding to the font problem mentioned on 12/06, all TextMeshPros have been changed to sprites to ensure the localisation working well.
19/06/2022
1. Compared to the line renderer, the trail renderer was finally chosen in realising the line graphs, as it matched the script of counting the change of status better.
2. Realised the misunderstanding between Xintong and me. A new scene from Xintong’s check-in changes was downloaded before, which I thought was an update of the visual style in responding to playtest 3’s feedback towards visual feelings, while she told me it was the response to another feedback on playtest 3, in which one of our colleagues suggested changing our scene according to the applied policies to give an obvious change to stimulate the players.
That was a huge problem as for most of the work I only did them in the later scene. Additional logic of both scripts and the game mechanic should also be produced if we were making the game as Xintong’s idea. We finally had to give up the first scene and turned all the content to the after scene.
22/06/2022 – Playtest 4
1. As predicted, the feedbacks were not enough, and the existing ones were not obvious enough as well. One player said “I can’t feel the people really living there. I feel like I’m just handling with data.”
2. The content gradually appearing on the background board was too easy to get blocked out by the main playing parts, plus, the appearing time of that content was arranged with a random range, so it was very often that some of the content was ignored. That was planned to be adjusted later to let the new content appear only if no policies or line graphs are open.
3. Some players mentioned the red cursor brought them a dangerous feeling. This situation sounds reasonable and the cursor was changed to a green one.
4. One of the playtesters misunderstood the function of the news and people’s stories appearing on the background board and thought they were new things that need to be dealt with.
5. Some players might like to change the pages back and forth, while we have only the function to change forward. That will be added if there is still time after all the bugs are resolved.
6. During playtesting there seemed to be a random bug that showed additional texts while the players opened new policies. After a long time of debugging after the playtest, we finally realized that was because some players had clicked the files more than once a time before the papers showed up.
As shown, the files on the desk were still clickable while policies were showing, which was the reason why some texts show up unexpectedly
7. One-half of the players didn’t really read the sentences in the menu scene carefully, but still, successfully know what they should do, which demonstrated that our guidance in both interaction and gaming aims has worked.
8. All of our playtesters preferred our last version of visual style, the elements they liked including but not limited to the map and the sense of technology.
9. One of our colleagues pointed out that we paid too much attention to adjusting the visual presentation continuously during the whole developing period, but these problems should have been avoided before the prototyping stage had done. We thought that was a precise critique.
22/06/2022
1. Several texts and coding problems have been fixed.
2. In response to the series of issues found from the process of playtesting 4, the line graphs, which are one of the essential objects but too possible to be ignored, are moved from the background board to the desk. A shake animation to those line graphs is also applied at the beginning of the game to call the players’ attention. Besides, the way of adding news and people’s stories is changed from replacing to overlying, to make it more obvious to the players as well as dividing the interactive and noninteractive areas thoroughly.
3. According to the advice from David, red lines are added as thresholds in the line graph to help the players recognize the ranges in which they should ensure the rates be in and hence clarify the gaming target.
After
In the upcoming summer, we are planning to remake this game with the former visual style and a better mechanic to give the players more space to use their subjective initiative, to let the players produce policies by themself, not only reading prolix texts and clicking “approve” or “reject”.
