✓ 20% Time: A New Adventure (Visual Novel Exploration)

...And here commences another crazy, ambitious project from Claire and Shahnoor. (This seems to be becoming a trend.) First of all, welcome to our blog! Let's get introductions out of the way. We're two friends wrapping up our senior year of high school. We became good friends after meeting in an art class, where we bonded over a mutual appreciation for the extraordinary and struggled, complained, failed, laughed--and eventually prevailed--our way through junior year. Last spring, we took on a rather ambitious project together that involved the creation of a short film. When we finally arrived at our end product, we knew we'd found our niche. Having experienced the immense gratification of succeeding at such a time intensive project, we knew we wanted to attempt a similar task in the future. So here we are! Except this time, we're not making a film. We're making a game. And it's going to kick major butt.

(Although we might be a little biased.)

The Run-Down:

The inspiration behind this year's big Claire-and-Shahnoor-adventure was the introduction of "20% Time" by our Anatomy & Physiology teacher. The concept of 20% Time is simple. Depending on where 20% Time is instituted--say, a school or a company--students or employees are allowed 20% of their normally scheduled work time to explore a topic that they're passionate about. Google is one of the most noteworthy examples. The search engine giant allows its engineers to spend 20% of their time at work pursuing a pet project of their choice. As long as the project furthers the company in one way or another, they're in the clear! That's actually how Gmail and Google News were formed.

So where does this leave us? Shahnoor and I (if you haven't guessed already, hi, it's Claire! We're alternating who posts major blog updates, which will happen every other week. But I'll get into that later) are creating a game with a twist. Rather, a visual novel game that implements psychology components! But first, I should probably explain what a visual novel is in the first place. A visual novel is an interactive fiction game riding primarily on narration and static graphics. There's minimal gameplay, meaning that the player isn't frantically stabbing the buttons on a controller to move around and perform a bunch of actions (sorry, Grand Theft Auto lovers). Instead, a visual novel can best be compared to one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 80's. The gameplay relies on character interactions and dialogue choices; essentially, the choices you make when playing the game directly impact the outcome! Let's say you're playing a visual novel and a certain situation comes up. You're given three options--I should also note that you usually can't tell what the best possible choice is--and must choose one in order to move on. Depending on what you select, the storyline will progress in a different direction. That's another perk to visual novels: You can often play the same one multiple times without getting bored, because each time you'll find yourself with a new ending or scenario.

Essential Question:

How can we create a unique visual novel experience that incorporates topics of interest from our Anatomy & Physiology class? As much as we like the class, when thinking about how to answer this, neither of us were very keen on the idea of making our visual novel strictly science based. We wanted to provide a gaming experience that would be accessible, constructive, and engaging for the largest possible audience, and we were concerned that making the visual novel too scientific would deter those who are less inclined to the subject from playing. Our solution? To freely design and create an awesome, suspenseful, fictional plot for our game... and use it to tell players how good their emotional intelligence is.

Quick mini-lesson: Emotional intelligence (EQ), by definition, is the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict. We plan on designing the game in such a way that the outcome the player receives after making what s/he believes are the best choices in the situation will indicate the strength of his/her EQ.

As stated in our "about" section, Shahnoor is heading EQ research and the creation of the game manual (to which the player will refer in order to determine how good his/her EQ is at the end of the game), while I've tasked myself with visual direction (making the characters, animations, and static images) and game programming. 

Goals:

• Short-Term:
• Completely map out the storyline (currently in progress!) and establish which combinations of choices in-game will lead to the various endings
• Choose defining moments for the game, where one choice will dramatically alter the game player's path (this will determine how many special cut-scenes Claire needs to create)
• Long-Term:
•  Finish character sprite and background design
• Use Python to create and code the script
• Use Ren'Py to program the game
• Create a promotional video (Sony Vegas)
• Complete the game manual and apply Emotional Intelligence (EQ) research to each path description
• Overall:
• Gain as much experience as possible! It's our first time narrating stories through gaming, so we have quite a few skills to learn
• Have fun with the project and practice how far we can stretch our imaginations and manage our stress, thus testing our own emotional intelligence