TheAshBlog

A work in progress of my latest level, a gas harvesting colony.

Check out the other visualisation styles on my website,

Recently I’ve watched some videos by Extra Credits on YouTube about Skinner Box Mechanics in games. The Skinner Box was an experiment where a bird was put in a box, in the box was a button, which when pecked, dropped food. The bird would just keep pecking the button. It was found that if the button only dropped food randomly every few pecks, the compulsion to keep pecking was greater. I’ve also heard long ago, but I can’t recall where, about a similar setup where the button would either drop food, or zap the animal, and the effect was still the same.

Mechanics like this are applied to games to make the player waste time, to keep them engaged where there is no content, often in MMOs, where when a player kills a creature it has a small chance of dropping something the player needs, and so the player keeps killing enemies long after there is any fun involved. This design is used in poker machines too, where pulling the lever will usually make you lose, but people keep pulling it and putting money in because they hope that they will win. This kind of design creates a psychological trap, and is used to cheaply keep the player engaged. I’ve never really been stuck in something like this, though I can’t say why, maybe it’s because I don’t enjoy MMOs, or I’m too quick to walk away, or maybe I have been but I don’t remember.

Is this something we’ve applied to Unbound? No, for the simple reason that enemies don’t respawn, and so it’s impossible to keep killing enemies just to find a particular item. While enemies do drop items randomly when they die, there isn’t really than many to go through anyway.

Several weeks ago I watched a few videos from Cryaotic, a guy who makes cool let’s plays on youtube, playing Yume Nikki, which is a game about a girl suffering from the effects of sexual abuse. I also read most of an article on GameTheory, “The Begginer’s Guide To Yume Nikki” (The links are below). This is a really interesting game as it abstractly, but very strongly represents the traumatic effects that abuse and depression can have on a person. The character in the game is Madotsuki, who refuses to leave her apartment, and sleeps all day. The majority of the game takes place in her dreams with the player collecting items while exploring strange and somewhat uncomforting environments that will represent her sexual abuse and emotions in some way. I was studying the theme of abuse in this game as it is also the driving theme of ours, Unbound. While Yume Nikki is a stronger and more confronting example of the theme, there are many ways the two games can be compared. For one, Madotsuki's dreams contain many different worlds that are all very different, and may supposedly represent her different feelings and emotions. In Unbound, we have used the different stages of grief to represent each of the levels, as well as the different elemental effects. The three bosses in Unbound representing depression and corrupted nature, can be compared to some of the bizarre creatures encountered in Yume Nikki, which are believed to represent such things as sex, horror, and isolation. The last thing I'd like to mention is how Yume Nikki is a game about the effects of abuse tearing this girl apart, leading herself into isolation, and eventually suicide, whereas Unbound takes an approach of dealing with the abuse, going through the stages of grief and eventually coming to acceptance, and the abusers, the Imps, are hacked to pieces throughout the game. We thought a lot about the ethical question of should we be solving our problems by killing, would that really help, but our primary goal was to make a fun hack and slash type of game. Looking back we might have been better off representing our enemy not as another individual to be blamed, but as negative thoughts and aspects of our own mind that must be overcome to escape depression.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_Sr7Z0cQ_0

http://gamejolt.com/games/unbound/82996

The trimester we’ve been making this game is finished, and we are releasing the game tonight! But since this is such a cool game, we'll be having an official launch event on the 8th of September! We’ll keep improving the game till then, so this is more of a beta build. I’ll post the links for itch.io, Gamejolt, and Gumroad when they’re ready.

Our game has been released as an alpha! It’ll be finished in just a few weeks now. It’s on both itch.io and gamejolt, on windows only at this stage. So please check it out and tell us what you think!

http://chainbreaker-studio.itch.io/unbound