Identity: Interiors, Exteriors

Here are the plans for my next steps with the Relationship/Identity prototype.

Character Creation
A small bit of preamble for the player to establish some preliminary settings before entering the sim.

Gender
Symbolic abstraction of gender. Circle or square, I'm thinking.

Preference
Sort of a sexual preference where you choose one of the genders that your character will be attracted to. This will tie into more advanced relationship modeling later where characters can perhaps fall in love, maybe even have offspring? Don't know if reproduction throws noise into the message or not yet.

Attitude/Color
This will be your starting color. It represents your starting attitude/worldview/personality, and will be more of a part of your character than in the current version. More on this in the next section.

Internal vs External Color
The point of this exercise is to explore the different facades we use when dealing with other people, as well as the bonds that form between people that share a certain outlook on life. Currently, the player is a totally free agent, exempt from any kind of grounding since he can change his color at will. I'm going to implement an 'internal color' in addition to an 'external color' to represent your real feelings vs those you're projecting to those around you.

The external color will be bound by the internal, so you can only stray a certain distance from your true feelings. If you express a color other than your internal color for a while, your internal color will begin to slide towards the external one. This might be a constant gradual process so there will still be alteration if you're frequently flitting between different external colors.

At some point I'd like to explore the concept of chroma representing the purity of someone's convictions. As they glide closer to grey,

Familiarity
When the player first sees a new character they'll appear gray, completely neutral and 'colorless'. The more the player stays within proximity of a character, the more the exterior color will begin to show. I'm thinking about doing this one channel at a time (R,G,B) instead of fading them all in at once, just to delay the hue reveal so the player won't be able to adapt his exterior color at the first faint sign of color. This might be ridiculous though, and I'll play around with the fade in to see what feels right.

After getting to know a character for longer, the interior color will begin to show itself. Matching color with the interior color of a character might result in stronger bonds of friendship or romance. Still thinking about how much complexity I want to include in the relationship model.

External Influences
Dramatic events shape our perspective on the world. Getting mugged, surviving a car crash, losing a loved one, these can all color the way we look at things. My first pass at implementing this sort of phenomenon will be colored projectiles that randomly fire into the scene, re-coloring the first character they collide with. This character is changed forever, both internally and externally.

I'm beginning to wonder if keeping a dev blog this detailed is going to diminish the impact of the final product, or if it's better to put details out in the open like this for critique and feedback. Anyone commenting, feel free to chime in on this topic. Curious what people think.

I'm also looking into a better way to make this available to people, as I'm currently coding in an XNA framework and using a 360 gamepad, which makes for a decidedly unportable experience.

Identity: First Steps

I've begun to work more on the prototype for Identity. (Initial post here) I'd initially worked out the color picker interface with a moving avatar and then put the thing down for a while. I've since revisited the little fledgling game and added the characters you'll interact with.

Recapping from the first post, the NPCs are letters of the alphabet. This keeps things as simple as possible while letting the player remember specific characters pretty easily.

Each character is introduced to the world with a random color. This represents a personality type and general mindset. The character then has some basic directives.

• Wander around, looking for others.
• If someone is similar to me, approach them.
• If someone is very dissimilar to me, avoid them.
• If I'm around someone similar long enough, alter my attitude(color) to be more like them.

The player is perceived by these entities, but is otherwise a free agent. He can change his color at will, and they will act accordingly.

Once I got the basic attraction/repulsion/mimicry behavior in, I was able to watch patterns emerge. One thing that I expected was cliques. You'd get clusters of like minded people that would rove about, accreting others who were anywhere close to similarly minded. Unchecked, the system would stabilize in 2 or 3 major factions.

What I didn't expect was peer pressure. When I was able to go up to a small group, 1-5, I could easily match their color then slowly sway the group along the spectrum to whatever hue I wanted. With a large group, however, every unit was mimicking its neighbor, so I had a lot more competition for swaying a unit to change its hue. The tactic I usually ended up resorting to was physically pushing a character away from the group, then coercing it before it could return to the others.

My next steps will be to make the general behaviors more subtle, and to try and work in an influence stat, since some characters are more likely to sway others to their color than others.

Video footage below:

Identity: Introduction

Here's a first draft design doc of something that came to me on the commute home tonight. I think I'll probably prototype this over a few lunches next week and see what develops.

Premise
We all have several different faces that we wear when interacting with people. Family, friends, spouses, co-workers, etc. This idea involves mechanics that allow the player to shift identities in the presence of different people through the metaphor of color. Analogous colors will work well together while complementary colors will clash. Each session will take only a few minutes, and at the end the player can see how many friends were made and how much integrity he retained.

Interface
My first thoughts are using 2d and a dual stick controller since I'll probably be mocking this up in XNA. Left stick moves while the right stick will change color. I think that mechanic is going to need instant fine tuned access, so an analogue stick would work well for this. The stick will access a radial menu around the character, perhaps requiring a button press for confirmation. I want to involve the triggers as well to set some sort of intensity or radius for the color being exhibited. It'll take some prototyping to work out.

Colors
As mentioned above, the player can change colors to represent a different personality facet he's exposing. I might include the triggers to slide the value up and down to sort of represent the introvert/extrovert continuum or chroma/purity of the facet being displayed. Closer to grey in this case means sort of wishy washy. You can play it safe and stay near grey, and everyone will sort of tolerate you, but you'll never make any true friends.

Staying close to someone with a similar color will raise their opinion of you. A high enough opinion might result in them following you around more, making it tricky to befriend people of opposite colors. If you're dragging along a deeply green friend and try to chat up the red guy, you'll either piss off the green friend by shifting to red, or go middle of the road and sort of bore them both. I'm not certain if I want to deal with interactions between the NPCs themselves.

Letters
The entire cast of characters should fit within an alphabet of letters. This allows them to be iconic and abstract, but still memorable. The player will easily be able to remember "I really pissed A off this time, while G became my best friend." Full names aren't abstract enough and edge in on a simulation threshold I don't want to cross. Unmarked shapes, however, won't allow the player to track progress as easily or project personalities and relationships into the 'NPCs'.

Each character will be a colored circle with a letter in the center. The color will represent the personality type you have to match. There will be some indicator as to the character's attitude towards the player. It might be represented in the letter on a monochrome white to black scale.

Gifts
Some letters will bear gifts like love and wealth. If the player wins them over through repeat interaction with a similar enough color, he will gain the gift from that character. Wealth accumulates in one large pile. Love could either be tallied by the number of characters that have given the gift, or it could be tracked on a per character basis as something that can be gained and lost. There may or may not be different ways these are obtained from a character.

Timeline
The timeline will direct the pace of the game. It simulates a lifetime of interacting with people. Events on the line will pass by (probably at the top of the screen, as different shapes on a line or something) and change the mix of NPCs on the screen. Big events (birthdays, funerals?) will have a larger variety of people, while everyday occurrences like school and work will offer the player repeat opportunities with the same smaller group of characters. Funerals and the ebbing of life might be a cool thing to look into as well, having letters fade away after a time, as long as it doesn't detract from the core message of the game.

Goal/Endgame
I don't think this is going to be a win/lose sort of experience. There will be trackable metrics that accumulate at the end. The player can amass love and wealth. The player will also have a color at the end that will vary in hue, chroma and value. Each of these axes will tell part of the story of how that player approached things. Once the player has checked it out a couple of times, he can set his own goals and see if he can achieve them, maybe learning a thing or two along the way about the mechanics, and by proxy his own approach to interfacing with human beings. That's a pretty lofty goal, however.

So that's the first pass. Some of the moment to moment stuff is a bit vague, but I think there are ingredients in there for an interesting experience. Posts to follow as prototyping commences.