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What's the sensible thing to do when offered a choice between writing a paper or doing a creative project for a Gender in Science class' final? Offer to make a game expressing the themes of the class! And make all the art for it yourself, too, using an art program that you also wrote from scratch! That must be equivalent, roughly, to fifteen pages of analysis, right?
No. It... kind of isn't. And not in the way of being a deficit of expended effort. Still, it produced this game, The Scientific Method, and that process taught me a lot about programming, game design, and the importance of testing your exported program! That last one came in handy during work this summer, surprisingly enough.
Just an FYI: If you package a Java project as an executable .jar file, and you want to include, say, art assets in that .jar, you cannot access them as files. At all. So what works during development in your IDE breaks horribly when you export it; furthermore, exact pathing is a must, and you can't do this lovely little trick of generically grabbing the only file within a folder so that you can avoid having to rename new art assets constantly.
The original submission only discovered this fact fifteen minutes before it was due, so four hours later I gave up, had the idea that the mountain must be brought to Mohammed, and made it so that the user could specify the location of the art assets themselves. Very awkward, had to overhaul the project for an undesired design framework out of desperation.
Let a month or two go by, though, and suddenly the problem's been solved, the feature has been re-implemented, and I can finally share it widely without being annoyed at that design implementation! Now the problem is just to work on the actual gameplay, but I'm happy to share what I've got cause it's a lot, and I'm very happy with it.
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Scientific Method |
![Picture](/uploads/6/9/9/6/69968245/published/customize.png?1534963578)
The actual game is trying to express the idea that the experiences one has when working in science are contextual to the identity of that person, and are a result of other people's perceptions of them as that affects their behavior; for example, a black woman will be treated differently than a white man, and not in a helpful/positive way. This induces greater difficulty to get ahead, permitting those not having such experience to get further and, if they are unaware of this unconscious bias, further promote an attitude that considers the people being held back to actually just not be as good, leading to harassment when a contrary viewpoint is presented.
That whole melange is what the game is trying to express, and currently kind of does so. It's very early in development, basically having all the mechanical backing implemented and tested so that the actual game mechanics can now be focused on, which I plan on trying to work on when I have the time.
Gameplay is done through two modes: Socialization and Research. The former is when you can talk to other members of the scientific institute (not yet implemented), and the latter when you play a mini-game that varies in difficulty in a few different ways, the crucial one being in how it interprets your score: actual members of the institution interpret how well you did, so you get an actual score for your performance, and then how much credit you're given for your work when your research is reviewed.
That is what is currently present, but I want to add the ability to hire other researchers to help you, which can have a variety of effects based on their biases of you, the character, whose identity you can customize in a fair number of ways that I am still fleshing out some more. Certain traits aren't obvious, so an option to have your character hide certain things and permit a random event to be the leaking of something you were keeping secret to affect people's perspectives of you is in the pipeline.
The overall goal is to have a lot of subtle things that affect peoples' perspectives of you, many of which don't come up as anything for a person in the demographically dominant groupings, as those are widely accepted and granted power (white, male, heterosexual, middle/upper class, non-disabled.)
I also want to tamper with the visual design of this some more; I need more character 'skins' (I ashamedly use the female body for female and non-binary gender options, and don't have any for physical impairments yet) for variation and expression, and having movement animation would also be nice. Kind of low priority against getting actual game elements implemented, but still on the list.
I've been greatly enjoying making my own art for this project, and what's more, doing so with an art program I created myself as well! 8-Bit Art's been a lovely project to use and create; adding new features as the idea springs into your head to have available in under half an hour is an experience that fills me with a good bit of joy. I've posted about it before so I won't go on about it, but... I super enjoy that one.
Anyways! This one was an update that's been in the pipeline for ages, I just had to fix up some file issues which took a while to get to. Hope you enjoy having a look at it, have yourself a lovely day, and see you Monday! I've got a backlog of stuff that should make for consistent posting for a little while. Like, maybe a month of M/W/F scheduling? Let's see if I can use that time to make some more stuff to post, too!