Keep Your Head Down

Keep Your Head Down is a game designed for the Indicade Hidden Heroes game jam. The game jam's theme was 'hidden hero' (someone who is a personal influence to this project), and the jam duration was nine days. We created a biographical game that describes the story of an individual present at a protest during a perilous moment. The game puts forth unique and interesting perspectives on the situation through differences in tonalities between the individual's energetic description and the gameworld's underlying dystopian nature. A team of 10 students created the game. It tied for 1st place overall at the game jam and was featured at the IEEE conference on games 2023 in the Games for Life panel!

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Here's a link to the game's itch.io page! - https://brandonlymangamedev.itch.io/keep-your-head-down

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Contributions

This section contains an outline of my contributions to the project, while the expandable text boxes below provide detailed explanations of each contribution.

• Lead ideation and brainstorming sessions, structured using experiential design principles.

• Designed all gameplay mechanics, two of three playable levels, and collaborated with teammates on narrative design.

• Designed the core gameplay experience centered around re-creating the emotional experiences of the hidden hero.

• Labeled the emotional feel of each scene/level based on emotional models like the emotion circumplex model for accurate descriptions and ease in semantics across the team.

• Designed the scene flow based on narrative implications and mechanic tutorialization. For example, the push mechanic is introduced during the protest scene's exploration stage so that players can self-discover the mechanic and practice it in a safe setting before using it to get through the next more challenging riot scene.

• Created the game design document and documented the game pitch, target audience, scope, narrative, gameplay mechanics, and level design sections.

• Playtested the game to identify design problems, game-breaking bugs, and issues with game balance and created tickets for the problems to be fixed with solutions.