Niv Khurana
Project Goals
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Practicing rapid design and prototyping skills
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Learning a new engine (Bitsy)
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Writing scenes with limited dialogue in a way that the audience can imagine the situation without previous context to refer to
Research & Planning
Game Design
The theme of the game jam was Goncharov, a fake mafia movie. The movie was made popular on the internet as a collective joke, where people would improvise characters, scenes and media analysis for this film. When we decided to participate in the game jam, the team almost instantly thought of making a game around the experience of analyzing and posting online about Goncharov rather than adapting a "scene" from the movie itself.
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The gameplay was based on this central narrative. Initial ideas would have involved a photography mechanic, after which the player would be able to select multiple options to caption the picture with when posting to their character's blog. For the sake of time, we decided to work in Bitsy and make both elements simple enough to make this game over one weekend.
Writing
Goncharov (1973) is a movie that exists entirely online, with improvisations or ideas becoming "fact" based on how popular they are. For the overall narrative of the game, I planned two scenes. There would be a scene from the movie, followed by the narrator talking about the real location where the scene was shot in their small town. The events of the small town would parallel the scene from the movie in some way. After discussing the gameplay and mechanics, I started looking into the movie's widely accepted canon for reference. The host of the game jam had compiled several documents which served as a basis for learning about the characters. This was my primary reference material, along with the citations in the document and general online discussion serving as a guide on the speaking style I would need to use for the narrator.
Development Process
Writing
During the research stage, it was decided that the main character in the scene would be Ice Pick Joe. He is described as a violent and unpredictable killer, quite common in old mafia movies and media at large. When looking into characters to pair him with for the scene, Katya stood out as both a spy and a character known by fans to be a subversion of popular tropes involving women. I planned for Ice Pick Joe and Katya to have some kind of confrontation that would lead Katya to learning of his true nature. The specific line "there was no man of honor here" caught the interest of the team, and we decided that the real world situation paralleling the film would be the narrator having a revelation about their identity; choosing Katya over Ice Pick Joe and all that they represent. I wrote a summary of both scenes, designing the Goncharov one to show a physical battle between the introspective Katya and the outward-looking and action-focused Ice Pick Joe. This contrasted with the internal battle the narrator faced between the expectation of society and her own inner self.
After the scene summaries, I wrote the long version of the dialogue for each scene. The dialogue for the Goncharov section was put into the game and tested for overall flow and length.
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Version Two of the dialogue was written as a shorter version of the original. There were more implications of events than descriptions of them- while this offered less direction and context to the players about specific scenes, it suited Goncharov's theme of personal interpretation, and would allow players to visualize the scenes in whichever way was most meaningful to them. This version of the Goncharov scene was read out loud within the team and made shorter. The real world scene was made shorter from version two as well, and directly split into sections to indicate whether it would appear during the first image or during the walking section, as well as specific items that might trigger it.
What Went Right
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Project was finished in less than 48 hours, the initial deadline.
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More detailed setup and documentation allowed for easy communication and implementation.
What I Learnt
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I was able to develop my skills and practice in using Bitsy
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I was able to practice dialogue writing, rapid design and prototyping
What Went Wrong
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Due to time constraints, only one set of scenes could be made​
How I Overcame It
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Game was redesigned to allow each set of scenes to be a complete story so more can be added at a later time