An Experiment In Games Design - Designing to Music

With my recent discussion of designing to a user's "feeling" and the emotional side of an experience, along with my lust for experimenting with game designs, I thought I'd set myself a new challenge: adapt a piece of music into a game.

For this purpose, I chose a piece I know very well and am a big fan of: "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur" by Sigur Ros. This particular piece's lyrics are unintelligible to me, so I'll be working purely from my personal interpretation of the musical elements of the song.

Here's a Spotify link if you'd like to hear the song.

My first impression of the song is always a sense of triumph - to me, it is a song for marching past crowds, with your head high. The most noticable thing that happened at this point was that I instantly began picturing the action on-screen (albeit in a rather vague fashion), which made me run quite close to the "cool stuff happens" school of design.

I took the idea of marching triumphantly, and combined it with the imagery I was associating it with: people cheering in unison, parades, confetti, fireworks. This led me to a game mechanic I knew well - the challenge of herding.

And thus "The March Of Triumph" was born:

March Of Triumph

The player plays a character returning to his home town triumphant from a great victory. Or perhaps he's just having a really, really good day. Who knows. Whatever the situation, he has somewhere to go, and he's marching there with his head held high. As he does this, he spreads cheer to the town around him - flowers grow, rubbish clears away, and everything is brightly coloured. Thing is, this town is filled with miserable, sad people who stare at the ground all day. They spread their misery everywhere, killing plants and spreading muck around.

The player must march triumphantly through the town to his destination within a set time limit. As they pass the glum, depressing inhabitants of the town, passing close to them will cause them to "catch" your happiness. They'll brighten up, cheer up, and start marching with you.

Thing is, they're fickle - if at any point they look out and can only see misery, they'll get depressed again.

Cheer up enough people and the player can unleash a little happy flourish, sending out a radial burst of super-happiness that'll attract the attention of depressed people who aren't even looking - as well as setting off chain reactions of flourishes in your followers, and just looking incredibly happy and joyful.

The aim of the game is to reach your destination within the time limit and with as many happy followers as possible. The game also tracks how "happy" the city looks after each march.

Overall, I think the game mechanic is derivative - its a cross between snake and lemmings, really - but it does stand a good chance of not only being fun, but communicating my intended emotional experience to the player.

What this shows is that, while I was onto something with the genesis of an idea from an emotive experience, there is something to be said for prototyping and tinkering with gameplay mechanics. In my opinion, the solution is to take concepts such as this to prototypes as rapidly as is possible, so that the mechanics can be tested and tinkered with - ultimately even discarded if they don't work.

I'm also pretty sure a large part of the design came from my recent gameplay experience (I've had nothing to do for two days but sit and play Saint's Row 2, endlessly, for hours on end). I do wonder, given how large a part the city plays in the concept of the mechanic, if playing something else recently might have given me a different setting, and thus a different game mechanic.

I quite enjoy these small challenges, and will be continuing to set myself to them when I have spare time. I hope others will join me in the weekly challenge over at http://gdchallenge.wordpress.com/ .