From a Clique Shoot to a Raved Tune

Michelle Griffis, Spring 2022

I created a bitsy game using part of the storyline from the Quiet School Year game we played in class earlier in the semester. I used the oblique strategy cards to help me plan how the game would be structured around the story. Some of my ideas that came from these cards slightly changed after I made the game, but here are the ideas I came up with using them:

Repetition is a form of change - able to move through the different rooms, but they change over time
What is the reality of the situation? Jam sits in the bathroom and talks to herself when she realizes Jim’s been switching their lunches– realizes that she believes their relationship is irreparable
Lost in useless territory - both are lost in different areas of the school
Simply a matter of work - the two separate and work on themselves while exploring the new worlds offered by the story in the school
Trust in the you of now - at the end– jam trusts that after they have changed, they can repair their relationship

The first card helped me think of how to design the school in the game, as you can move between rooms and they often look the same but there are slight variations as the story progresses, though if nothing progresses then the player can freely traverse the school in a static state. The second card helped me think of how to develop the story, though instead of having a scene in which Jam is thinking to herself, as though in a cinematic, I had her dialogue reflect her feelings about her relationship. For the “Lost in useless territory” card, I instead had Jim fall into the hole alone and go on his own journey to repair himself, and he ends up realizing that the area he finds himself in reflects his own issues that he then strives to fix. The next card is included in how the creatures in the other world wish to fix themselves but won’t change, while Jim finds himself wanting to put the effort into becoming the person he wants to be, and the final card is reflected in how Jim has changed and trusts that he will be better, and this belief in himself is what helps repair his relationship with Jam. I used Botnik to come up with the lines the creatures said to help Jim realize his shortcomings in communication: ”The world is not without consequences”, “that is the moment another problem broke out”, and “but with her work at least many questions dry up”; these three quotes come from using the pbs-nature keyboard on botnik. I used the anagram generator for the title: quiet school-clique shoot, adventure-raved tune. I used otter.ai and charNG in conjunction, telling what I remembered of the story verbally in otter.ai and putting that file into charNG to create a jumbled sentence to show how the other world sustains confusing communication by jumbling Jam’s ideas before the group leaves. I used n+7 to change one of the lines from botnik into “The worth is not without considerations”, as I thought the dialogue it created was fitting between the rabbit and the hunter. I crowdsourced the sprites of all of the creatures in the other world, asking friends to create 8x8 pixel arts that I added to the game but did not edit, and found ways to make them fit the narrative.