Concept:
For this project, I couldn’t really think of anything in particular that satisfied the requirements, so I took another approach where I thought of elements I wanted to have in my work and I slowly expanded from there to satisfy the requirements. Whenever I feel stuck or uninspired, I’d turn to cats because I just love cats, and thus I started brainstorming this project with cats. After many considerations on the user interactivity and my artistic preference, I ended up with the idea of ‘Choose’ your destiny but as a cat. The work revolves around a day in the life of a cat in a cafe where it’s cozy, calm, and full of ‘ambiance’, something I personally enjoy as well. I wanted the work to have as many ‘senses’ as possible, and to me that would mean sound, so throughout the work, I intend to create a cozy, natural world through constant sounds that’s not abrupt and well designed. To make the ‘choose your destiny’ design intentional and purposeful, I plan on weighting the choices so there will be a result (cat name/ nick name) displayed at the end of the game that reflects on the choices users made. However, one fun twist of this is that while the result is reflective of the user’s choices, it’s not really a destiny that they ‘chose’, but rather the opposite: an ‘already-decided’ destiny that you got to know about in the end. The result explains the user’s choices through the cat name. This feature is just a concept I personally find interesting.
sketch:
Design:
For the visual design, I plan to just play into the cozy vibe as much as possible so that might mean warm tones, winter/rain, plants, and really anything that seems like an ‘ideal cafe’ for me. For the user interaction aspect, users will mainly interact with the work through choices/options to ‘choose your destiny’, but I plan to add other elements into the cafe where the user can interact with in different ways to discover sounds, images, etc. just to make the ‘cafe’ more ‘alive’.
I plan to make the scenes into a class to make the code more concise and efficient, and also to explore the specific built-in function/ interactivity design as I work on the project just to experiment and see which is better for the result, which is pretty subjective to my artistic decision.
Most frightening part:
To me, the most frustrating part would be the sound design, because really, the main way the story is delivered is through sound and to make sound “prevalent” without making it noisy and overwhelming is something I’d need to spend time to refine, especially given the specific mood I want to achieve. Another part would probably be the scene transitions but I think I’ll have a better idea once I start experimenting.
Actions to minimize risk:
For the sound engineering part, I plan to limit the variations of sound and manipulate the volumes to make sure it’s not overwhelming and noisy while appropriately cultivating the ‘cafe world’ and achieving the feeling and tone I want. I also will research and experiment with the different transitions i can utilize to make the work more coherent and ultimately the user experience more smooth and enjoyable.