For Waking Up In A Safer World

I was on a project with the anti gun violence non for profit organization, Branches of Bravery, when I was in the undergrad. The organization was founded by several high school students who experienced gun violence in a high school in Fort Lauderdale. It was then I started to pay more attention to the gun crime news. Most of the gun violences are happened in the places we all would go. As a result, there are no true outsiders since we could all be affected. The only way to avoid the tragedies happening again is to do something against the gun violence. It could be attending the protest for gun control, or joining a gun control non for profit organization, you name it. The key is to make an action. 

To make my voice out, I came up with the time looping story and made it a game prototype, Wake Up. 

Wake Up is one of the games I made at the very beginning of my game design journey. Since I lacked technical skills back then, it was completed by XD and merely a prototype rather than a real game. Although the game is still rough, I really love the experience of designing the interactive comic book game. 

The Design Process

Having the idea of a time looping story is clearly not enough, to make sense of the surreal experience, I focused on doing research about past gun crime cases to come up with the scripts.

It was a torture for me to read the news. Every case is written by blood, people are dying. The helplessness makes me feel awful. As a result, I decided to reflect the helplessness in the game by using the real cases. 

I chose several cases that happened in different scenarios and locations, then wrote my story based on the cases. There are tragedies happening in the workplace, school, Walmart, night club and even at home. The key concept here is to emphasize that gun violence could happen everywhere to everyone. No one is outsider. 

After addressing the core idea, I started to design the experience of the time loop. It was quite straightforward at the beginning that players would enter the time loop after they “died” for once, and keep looping until they make their actions against gun violence. The key problem is how can I emphasize the loop breaker without giving them the hint and end the loop without enough exploration. I was meant to keep players from making different choices and found out that they are killed no matter what they choose unless they make actions. Then it ends up with no right choice in the first round that players must be “dead” at least for once to enter the loop. The choice of making actions would appear in the second round, at the bottom, not extra visible to encourage players to play for another several rounds. 

The last design I made in this game is to put the real cases’ description when the player heads to the dead end. It would remind them of the cruelty of the real world, and put some pressure on them. I understand it may scare some players, so I put the warning on the start page to make sure they are affordable. 

That is how the mechanics and story came to reality. The next question is how can I make it visually appealing and match the tone of the story in the art side. 

Arts And Visual Style

Since I was limited by my technical skills back then, there were not many choices for me to develop an advanced fancy look game.

I was prototyping the game in the XD, and the idea of a comic book came to my mind naturally.

I used the black and red as the main color to address the cruelty of the issue. Then I googled several images and posterized them into the same comic style, keeping it as realistic as possible. In order to keep players not feeling frightened, I did not use the actual crime scene images. 

To emphasize the time loop and remind players that they are not replaying the game, I changed the text color in the first page, second round. I also added shadows under the choices in order to differentiate them from the narration.

Post-Mortem

Wake Up is not really a polished game. I still have tons of ideas going on to make it more interesting. It was an important experience for me to combine the real issue with the format of the game to address my voice. 

It was this game that showed me the strength of games that games are not only for fun but can be serious. I would keep making serious games that address social problems, and I believe that it would be more acceptable for people to take it.