My First Mission: the corner store collection
This sketch is a mini-game take on the Japanese show “Old Enough”, in which children are given errands to do without their parents supervising them. In this game, the player must use the up and down arrow buttons to steer the meandering kid while avoiding obstacles and collecting gachapon!
Get him to the store at the end of the road before the time runs out. Be careful not to run out of focus or get too distracted by the gachapon machines!
Made for the QUT Creative Coding unit and consequent exhibition, you can play the game here! (Using the 1, 2, 3 buttons as well as the up and down arrow keys.)
Get to the corner store before it closes!
Creative Influences
Some of the key creative influences for this game include the show Old Enough, Kaz Ayabe’s Boku no Natsuyasumi, the artist InstantOnion, the game designer Yeo as well as Kaz Ayabe’s Natsumon and Shin-Chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation.
Old Enough sees kids running errands for their parents without supervision. Understandably, the errands become quests, as the children face the allure of Japanese vending machines, gachapons and food vendors. They become distracted by people and objects, and regularly need encouragement to remain focussed on the task at hand. Old Enough is my primary creative influence, as I’ve taken that experience and tried to gamify it.
Kaz Ayabe’s work for the company Millenium Kitchen has been instrumental in pioneering the genre of “Summer Vacation” games. These games create nostalgic atmospheres; carefree kids, collecting items, solving mysteries and buying snacks while enjoying their school vacation in rural towns in Japan. I wanted this game to feel like it could have been included as a mini game within one of Ayabe’s summer vacation games.
The artist InstantOnion’s work has all the same qualities of Ayabe’s, but uses pixel art as the medium to convey the beauty and nostalgia of Japan. Finally, I took more visual inspiration from the designer Yeo, who’s side-scrolling beat-em-ups are set in Japanese cities and delve into the interesting characters you meet there.
Design and Aesthetic Choices
I chose a pixel art style because it inherently evokes a sense of nostalgia and I felt that this fit well with a child running errands for his grandfather. The limited range of colours and design choices within pixel art also allowed me to stay focussed on conveying clarity in my aesthetic choices, and kept the asset creation time within scope. A side scrolling mechanic made sense both mechanically and narratively. The child needed to get from A to B. But the children in Old Enough often get distracted easily and wander around, so I randomised the direction that the child walked in and I added time constraints to put pressure on the player to control the character sprite.
I introduced a single collectible item, gachapon capsules, which gained the players points, similar to a star rating. These were placed on the footpath to try and tempt the player to risk running out of time in order to get a higher score. I added a “focus” bar (as opposed to a stamina bar, which I felt fit the theme better), which drained the more it was used and this mechanic forced the player to balance the natural wandering with trying to collect gachapon, dodging obstacles and achieving the main objective.
Approach to Design Process
For this assignment, I knew I wanted to make a game interaction of some kind. As a fan of visual novels, I wanted to create a prototype for a personal story I have been developing. Yet after pondering the scale of branching narratives, I saw that an arcade-style mini-game was among the suggested sketches for the Louie PLAY cabinet, so I decided to make a themed mini-game. Initially I wanted to create a narrative focussed open-map game, where the child walked around and collected sentimental objects to piece a story together. Aesthetically (setting, art style, narrative) it would have been very similar to the work of the game designer Yeo (The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa, Fading Afternoon), but writing the narrative in time became too difficult. I then changed the objective to getting to the shop at the end of the street while still collecting items along the way. But this also became an issue, as I couldn’t work out how to provide incentive for the player to pick up the items if the overall objective was to get to the corner store. I ended up scrapping the collectible items all together and decided to focus on challenging the player and creating enjoyable game play.
I changed his movement mechanic from being able to walk around wherever he wanted (which felt very janky and unforgiving with the randomised character movement) to a fixed position on the screen where the player could only control the general direction (an idea taken from Kaz Ayabe’s Boku no Natsuyasumi’s movement handling). I added obstacles in the road for the player to dodge and also implemented my own collision detector within p5js to track the collisions. But adding the obstacles presented a problem where players could simply walk on the footpath and avoid the roadblocks. To counteract this I slowed the character down whenever he walked on the footpath. When I eventually introduced different game scenes, the press detection within Javascript was registering button presses too quickly and was skipping over the tutorial and intro screens, so I built a function that registered each press with a delay.
Some features were omitted due to time constraints. In Old Enough, children regularly get distracted and purchase things like candy and gachapon with the money they’re given to complete their errand. I wanted to include money that would deplete the more you went to vending machines. I also wanted to include a more personal introductory screen that had two character portraits (the grandfather and the child) discussing the errand, and at the end, I wanted to showcase all the items the child picked up along the way, with tooltips that discussed how that object made the child feel.