品如的衣柜 (Pin Ru's Closet)
Description
This is the first game project created based on p5.js. The project is heavily based on graphic elements with mostly done by myself. The game is made into a cartoon and relaxing style with suitable sound effects (resources listed at the end). The game has three main parts with the beginning scene, the action scenen and ending scene. The idea of the ending scene is constructed with three different illustrations which would be lead to based on the players' choices in the action part.
Design Process
The start of the idea of this game is from my real life experience. A few weeks ago my friend and her boyfriend came visiting me in Beijing. Her boyfriend cheated on her with another girl who we also know about. The drama reminds me of one of a really famous TV show in China which is called "回家的诱惑 (Home Temptation)." Almost every young people know about one of the scenes in the show in which the main male character, Shixian Hong cheated on his wife, Pin Ru Lin with his wife's best friend, Allie. In the scene, Allie puts on Pin Ru's dress when she was with shixian, and shixian expressed his feeling as he thinks Allie "really puts something out there (sexually)!"
The language they used it in the TV show is very ketchy, and some of words soon became popular online as some new Internet language used by young people. For example, since Allie;s behavior is way below the moral standard but at the same time it is definitly possible in the reality which gives a humorous feeling. Thus it became a new internat language in the pop-culture, as saying "someone is wearing Pin Ru's clothes" is a humorous way to say someone is doing something really suprising. Thus, "Pin Ru's Clothes" became a thing among young people.
1. Drama, and the game form
Based on the information pieces, I formed the idea of making a dress-up game, which is called Pin Ru's closet. I would give different dresses a score,and players could make dress suits within the supplied dress option. Each suit will be calculate to have a final score, by which I would call it the "sao score." Different scores would lead to different ending scenes.
2. From "骚(sao)" to "秀(xiu)"
While thinking about the memes and the language, I figured that the meaning of "sao" changed by a lot. Besides the meaning of it as a verb, when Chinese people use it as an adjective, it is usually something negative. It was used to giving negative opinions on women who are being coquettish. But later it became a kind of pop-language and could be used in different cases even as complimenting someone. I'd say that we used to assign a gender to the word, but with the strenghthen of pop cultures, its gender preference is gradually eliminating.
3. The game character
The idea of sao and xiu lead me to the selection of the main character of my game - President Trump. The reason is the in Weibo, which is the twitter in China, pop language took the most part of young people's communication. Donald Trump is on of the most popular figures people would talk about as a "xiu er" since he has been doing so many things that suprised people...... Decent amount of his memes also flowing around all the time.
The design of how he shows up in my game is highly influenced by Andy Aitchison's design of "Trump Baby" which is a big ballon that flied over London when President Trump was visiting. When I first looked at the sketch of the ballon design, I think it is a perfect character design that fits my game graphic.
4. Meme and the ending
Meme is an extremely popular and widely use thing in China. Memes come from everywhere. Shows, movies, celebrities. animals, etc. Using meme to express feelings become today's young people's major way of communication. The memes from the TV show characters was once very popular (still use them now). So I decided to make my ending scenes with memes to express different ideas. Which meme the player would get, in other words, which scene they are jumping in depends on the score they get from the clothes they decided to put onto the main character. There are three different levels leading to three different endings. I would not tell which one is better but rather let the players try, because there's only one possiblity for the highest level and the lowest, and all the other matches fall into the middle.
Reflection
I been having a lot of trouble working on this game. It is not hard to know what I want and what kind of steps I probably need to take, but extremely hard to achieve them. Grammar is part of the problem, but more importantly the logic. I do find it hard to figure out especially for someone like me who does not have coding background.
I find myself always building the program in the simpliest way, by which I mean, the easiest way to understand the code. That leads to the fact that my code is tedious and unneccessary most of the times. That really kills me sometimes because more complicated but less time complicity code is not even easy to read for me.
Testing is boring, since bugs kill people's patient. But in my case here I am still mostly struggle with building the system sometimes, especially when it goes into details such as how to orient a class or a system. Most of the times I still have to find many examples to read how other people are doing and planting the logic into my own work rather than coding from the bottom. I hope with further practice I could get more familiar with the language and grammar.
Reference
Andy Aitchison's "Baby Trump:" https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-44732754
回家的诱惑 Drama Scene: https://jikipedia.com/definition/356970914
Pin Ru's meme: https://www.sohu.com/a/304575202_120052490
Sound Effect Resource: https://www.zapsplat.com/?s=game+end&post_type=music&sound-effect-category-id=