System Design Documentation

This is some example documentation that I would expect from a student. This covers the system I was inspired by, why this system, how I tried to implement it, and what I would do differently.

The System and Why As the instructor, I was inspired by physical energy and effort. It’s a common theme in my work. And here I intended to draw upon how muscles and energy work to transfer knowledge into the body.

The specific system I was inspired by was the way that visual perception leads to the creation of information in the brain. This kind of system appeals to me since I usually look towards natural processes for inspiration. I think there’s something interesting in magnifying interactions that we consider effortless through playful exploration. In this case, I’m examining the act of looking.

I thought of this as a two-stock constrained system. The two stocks are my energy to read, and the remaining amount of text on a particular page.

The relationship goes like this:

My energy is renewable, and can be spent to read a page. The Page has “content” which must be read to be turned into information. There is a limited amount of potential reading content. Like gasoline on the planet, I can only read so much before I either run out of content or I run out of energy.

This is the barebones of the two stocks. Though there exist more relationships. For example, the energy I spend changes the rate at which I can read a page. and the pages themselves can have varying content. My energy is also gradually increasing or decreasing depending on my mood!

How I implemented it and what I’d do differently

For the implementation, I wanted to have a game whereas you read words, you would spend stamina that would gradually recover. This would make players have a balance of speed and recovery, a healthy strategy for reading! And additionally players would need to move physically carefully across words, as some would cost more stamina to read than others.

I wanted to very specifically create a game in that moment of how the eye tracks across words.

In the game itself, this didn’t happen! I didn’t actually get to represent it all! I got lost somewhat in having fun with UI and also dealing with a technical problem in the implementation. The original plan was to make a game about moving an eyeball, Katamari-like, over the words, which each word costing me stamina. I was inspired by Dark Souls on this front. I ended up not being able to do this because I couldn’t separate each word into a mesh on its own. Or at least I couldn’t find anything.

So instead it became about tracking the mouse across the screen, trying to keep up with the page’s movement. This totally lost the physics of it all! But I had fun making this little prototype. It ended up still being rather entertaining to try and play this game. I was caught up more in the desire to make a game fun than to make it fulfill the system, though I think the inspiration about reading and speed is still there.

In fact, now making the game with a stamina system is still possible, but I ran out of time when trying to implement it. I wasted too much time with UI and Game state!

For next time, I would definitely allow myself to focus more on the theme that I wanted to bring out. Getting distracted may have made a “better” game, but I am sad that I lost some of the original systemic intentions here.