HOTPOT ALONE- Simulation of Daily Routine
Design mechanism: Starting from inspiration
This is a Hotpot simulator experiencing the moment “being alone”. In the game, the player would boil and eat hotpot home alone at a Christmas Eve with memories and thoughts randomly pops up. The game is based on a real-life experience of my friend, Lee, when she was home alone on Christmas Eve 2018, apart from those she loved. I found that experience an emotionally powerful moment. The challenge is to capture the moment with game experience. I stared to explore content to carry this experience.
Attempted Game Genre: Visual novel
Text would be the most direct method to express emotion. Feelings can get spoke out loud with conversations like phone call, texting, or inner monologue. Rather than making it a VN, I used phone chats and monologue in text in early demo. During the playtest, I found people tend to skip text to proceed the game. I later switched to doodles with memes and emojis to carry the same content, but in a visual representation. It works better and added more flavor to the game. At the end of the day I only used text when necessary.
Attempted Game Genre: micro-Management game
I prototyped with a micromanagement mechanism with early demos. The player was challenged to put food to cook in the given specific order and collect them within a time frame when food is done. For each round we gave a list of food and a countdown time of each food to be picked up. If the player pass the challenge, game continues, the next round gets more intensive and challenging.
The mechanism worked smooth and played fun, which is why I had to discard it -- it distracts player from the theme. During playtests, people were overwhelmed with the tense of the challenge, focusing only on success. As a result, there was little room left for them to taste the emotion of the narrative.
I ended up kept the mechanism that food get done within a time frame. In the final version, the food need to stay in the boiling water for certain amount of time, but I got rid of the timer. Now the player attempt to pick them up to try if the food is ready, just like the case for me with hotpot. I am always not sure if the food is ready. There are also visual hints that the color of the good gets darker when ready to eat. I removed the other challenges and penalties. The player activity ended up as a cycle of “pick food – cook – pick food - eat” accompanied with pop-up monologues triggered randomly, and some realistic environment interaction. This leaves player focus on the realistic interaction, to observe and feel.
