Class:
Rapid Prototype Production (RPP) 1

Game:
The Decision

Assignment:
You will be split into teams of 4-5 consisting of producers, programmers, and artists. In two weeks, create a game that tells a story.

Description:
The Decision is a game about an unremarkable young man and his girlfriend who are down on their luck and are running out of money to live on.  One day, the girlfriend convinces the young man that they should rob a friend of hers, so they decide to pay him a visit.  Because the entrance to the apartment complex is boarded shut, they climb the fire escape on the side of the building, and break the friend’s window.  Apparently he isn’t home, but the girlfriend insists that there’s a safe somewhere in the room.  After finding the money, the two hear someone else’s footsteps in the apartment.  The young man realizes that this “friend” is one of the city’s most infamous drug dealers, Syd!  Syd is furious and chases the two out of the apartment, to the building’s rooftop, and across the rooftops of nearby buildings.  The girlfriend has had enough!  She pulls a gun on Syd and asks the young man what he wants to do.  Should they give the money back and let bygones be bygones, or should they just take the money and leave?

Originally, we wanted to have the player make several big decisions throughout the game that would significantly change the story.  The biggest decision (the decision that the game’s name refers to) would be the player’s decision at the end of the game to either give up or get away.  We had also wanted to tell the story in a non-linear fashion.  The game would begin with the last few seconds of the story (chronologically) with the three characters on the rooftop, the girlfriend pointing the gun at Syd, and her asking the young man what he wanted to do.  The player would make the decision, and the game would jump back in time to where the story starts (the young man getting a call from his girlfriend in his apartment).  The story would progress linearly until the player got to the decision again, at which point, the game would take over, remembering the choice the player made at the beginning of the game, and conclude with a cutscene dependent on the player’s decision.  If the player chose to get away, the girlfriend would shoot Syd, and the young man and his girlfriend would get away with the money.  If the player chose to give up, the girlfriend would shoot the young man, and Syd and the girlfriend would run away with the money (we had originally intended to more heavily imply a past relationship between Syd and the girlfriend).

We wanted the wording of the choices to be clear enough to convey the moral dilemma of this otherwise innocent young man while at the same time being ambiguous/misleading as to the actual outcome of the decision.  If the player were feeling greedy and decided to take the money, we didn’t want the player (or the young man) to expect that the girlfriend would shoot Syd.  If the player didn’t feel that what the young man and his girlfriend were doing was the right way to get some extra money and decided to give up, we didn’t want the player (or, again, the young man) to expect that the girlfriend would shoot her boyfriend.

Unfortunately, many of these plans were lost in development, mostly due to time restraints, so neither the story nor the decision are really as strong as we wanted them to be.  Regardless, it still came out to be a pretty decent two-week game.

We never made a web-friendly or Mac-friendly build of the game, but for those of you with Windows, you can download the game here. There’s no installation, just unzip the file, and run the .exe.

Controls:

• WASD to move (up, left, down, right respectively)
• E to pickup/drop objects and perform actions
• Spacebar to jump
• Shift (hold) to run
• Press Alt and F4 together to quit the game.

Credits:
Artists – Ryoma Tazi and Adam Grayson
Producers – Arlen Eldridge and Paul Weiler
Programmer – Evan Cookinham