Most of the updates I have are conceptual. I’m sticking with my thesis idea; that is, a playable resume/auto-biography. The (tentative) title is Play my Life. One of the biggest challenges was how I was going to frame the game for a player. A generic menu seemed… bland, to say the least. I decided I’d frame the game as a museum, with two distinct exhibits; those being the resume exhibit, and the auto-biography exhibit. That way, it’ll be much easier for a user to get the experience they’re looking for whenever they play. Here’s a mock up title screen (without the title) that I made:
It’s not final, but I think it’s a good start.
I also decided how these two separate “exhibits” were going to play out. The auto-biography half, as you may expect, is going to take a more narrative approach. There will be tasks and objectives to complete, but given that it’s a linear story, there’s going to be a linear progression. I guess the closest comparison would be to call it an adventure game, but instead of playing as a hero in a fantasy environment you’re playing as a schoolboy in the early 2000s.
As for the resume exhibit, I struggled for awhile on how I wanted to show every thing I’ve learned. My gut instinct was to display a bunch of assets in a more traditional museum kind of way, but that… isn’t really a game. That’s a PowerPoint with a few extra steps. Instead, while I haven’t played them myself, I decided to take some inspiration from the WarioWare franchise. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the games are essentially compilations of what they call “micro-games” (a play on the term “mini-game”) which consists of short, easy to understand games that get a point across. The player has a limited amount of time to complete each micro-game, so they’re designed to be easy to understand and complete within a short amount of time. I think it would be an interesting idea to make micro-game-esque representations of any marketable skills, maybe going a bit more in-depth at the end of it for anyone who doesn’t get the full picture. Here’s an example of what these micro-games look like.
I want to take this semester to knock out as many assets as I can, so I’m not stuck staring at featureless shapes in Unity for too long. I have a lot to go, but I think I’m off too a good start.
I still think this is a really cool idea, it is definitely one way to make your resume unique. If you do stick with the museum setting you could have a feature like in Mario 64 where Mario jumps into paintings. You could have each painting lead to one of the micro-games. You could also make the title screen a little more interesting by adding little animations, the trees moving in the wind, clouds or shooting stars in the sky, etc.
I do have a question, lets say you fully finish it, everything is perfectly made and rendered, how are you going to share it? If you plan on sharing it with potential employers how can you make sure they would be able to play it? One way I could think of is if you have your own portfolio website you can somehow embed it, like a flash game.
Glad you’re moving forward with this project, I think it’ll be a great resume for you as well as a time capsule of these… weird times we’re in.
I did have an idea though: I, for one, love a good PowerPoint, but I thought of a different approach to the Resume section that’s different than WarioWare. What if there were two settings to the game: Narrative & Resume.
Narrative gameplay would play out similar to what you’ve outlined, you’re in a museum and you’re linerarly walking through your life. Might be interesting to bring in the WarioWare aspect here, with your life displayed as small snippets, titled something like “Moving into College, Fall 2017, Oil on Grass.” or something silly like that for the little plaque and then it’s like a little minigame. Although it’s linear, players can go back through previous games, and maybe previous games have answers to future games (eg. in the background of Moving into College maybe you hide your computer password that’s necessary for First Day in Class, etc.).
Resume gameplay is the differing idea: what if the player could pick to play the game ‘resume’ style, and suddenly they can see the back-end of the game. It’s exactly the same as the Narrative gameplay where they can walk around the museum and play the games and things, but they can also see the lines of code that it took to make the game work, similar to using Inspect Element on a website and the code appears on the side of the page.
It’d be cool if you included some comments in your code like
//Learned this in IMM 470!
//Thanks ____ for the idea for this part
/*This part was actually really hard to code, and I’ll explain why…*/
etc.
That way, you’re developing a story and a resume at the same time, and it feels like a more cohesive experience to the player. They see the front end then the back end of the same story, even possibly in parallel, so it’s easier to follow than two separated sections of a museum. You’re also getting to show off all the work you did (are doing??) for this project, which often goes unseen when the code is under the hood.
But whatever you decide to do, I can’t wait to see what’s next!
Hi, I really enjoyed hearing about your idea in class. As I read your status update, I can see that you have a solid handle on what you envision for your end product. Since the narrative will be taking place in a museum, I recommend looking up virtual museum tours and doing some research on how they are even created to give you a sense of how the perspective of different artifacts and artwork is the layout, in this case, pieces from your portfolio. I am excited to see how your idea turns out and hope you have fun while doing it.