For our final major project we needed to come up with an idea and present it before making groups and creating an idea to then make.
My individual idea was to make a frustration game where you would be… frustrated. I got the idea mainly from watching a YouTube video by Valefisk (Valefisk Crypt) and I thought it would be fun to torture people with a game of my very own making.
I went to jot down my initial thoughts about how to make a torturous game but they were heavily influenced by the video at the time and I didn’t like that.
In case you can’t read my terrible handwriting, the image says:
“FRUSTRATION GAME
Key Bindings } Bad/Wrong/Strange
Tooltips } Bad/Wrong/Strange
Fals Advertisement
Lack of Tutorial
Narrator
Companion
Maze
Puzzles
Disappearing/Reappearing Items
Meaningless Clues/Items
Sadistic
Pedantic
Technicalities
Common Phrase Voice Commands
Maze
Dead Ends
Long Corridors
Hidden Areas
Puzzles
Pictures
Items
Randomness
Unrelated Items
Inspiration
Crypt – Valefisk
Animal Crossing (Mr. Resetti) – Nintendo
The Frustration Game – Jeremy Wang (Disguised Toast)
Jump King – Nexile
Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy – Bennett Foddy”
I decided to go for a more frustration based approach than straight up torture as no one wants to play a game that isn’t fun. Torture isn’t fun, but frustration can be, so I researched frustration. Games, characters, mechanics, whatever I could find.
I collected a bunch of game examples that had frustrating elements to them (https://artslondon.padlet.org/whobbs0120191/fmp_inspiration).
I browsed forums and articles to find opinions on game mechanics that are frustrating. The image below is of my notes.
During my research I found that Bennett Foddy came up quite a bit, so I looked into him. Turns out he is quite the frustration game master, having made multiple titles, some of which I have played unknowingly. Foddy has a website where he posts about things and games he’s made, and there is an article written by him about frustration (https://www.foddy.net/2017/01/eleven-flavors-of-frustration/). I found this article particularly useful to help decide what kind of frustrations I might like to add to my game.
Moving on from frustration, I needed to figure out what type of game I would make, and the setting of it. Before I’d done the frustration research I had kinda gone towards a puzzle game, so i collected some info about puzzle games (https://artslondon.padlet.org/whobbs0120191/fmp_puzzle_games).
While looking at puzzle games, I remembered about the Tomb Raider series and thought it would be cool to have an ancient setting. Cue me trying to figure out what kind of ancient setting I wanted. One day, a friend and I were talking about movies we liked when we were younger and The Emperor’s New Groove and The Road to El Dorado were mentioned. This began the idea for what setting I wanted – Inca. I researched the Inca and collected a few notes about them (https://artslondon.padlet.org/whobbs0120191/fmp_inca_empire).
The Emperor’s New Groove influenced me quite a bit, to the point I wanted a llama companion for the player in the game. So time to research llamas and how people have made them cute (https://artslondon.padlet.org/whobbs0120191/fmp_little_companion_buddy).
I ended up changing from a puzzle game to a platformer game idea and created the following presentation about it.