Up the Stairs
Up The Stairs is a short mobile-game experience where a recluse man ascending his apartment meets ghosts along the way. As you ascend the stairs, each floor features a ghost with 3 possible narrative choices, controllable via a unique 3-pronged D-Pad designed to only allow you to move up…
Working as the sole programmer, I worked to implement my c-developer’s 2D art assets and sprites for animations. Using a simple array system, I created cycling animations and implemented each ghost, player, and floor to reflect unique colors and moods. Additionally, I utilized external Tweener modules to create feedback-driven mobile controls and buttons. Finally, I designed the unique controller design to work for both movement and dialogue selection.
Gameplay
Up The Stairs is a narrative experience where players meet the ghosts living in their apartment as they ascend each floor.
Players use the 3-pronged D-pad to move around each floor, ascend stairs, and select between 3 choices of dialogue. By the end, players realize they are meant to join the ghosts they have interacted with, with a final choice of how to emotionally reconcile with themselves.
Interaction
Each ghost is programmed to run through its own dialogue and show unique responses based on what players select. Ghosts are able to feel shade or love from the player which is visually reflected in their color after a selection is made. Afterwards, they are able to run the normal dialogue for all choice selections and then the player can move on to ascend the next floor and interact with more ghosts.
The interaction design was created to make a very simple dialogue system, with choices simply reflecting an empathetic, neutral, or negative response for each ghost’s questions and behavior.
Tweeners
Part of the learning experience for this project was understanding how Tweeners worked. In using an external DO Tween class from demigiant.com, I was able to apply the interpolation for simple button interactions and feedback. The mobile controls and button tweeting for fade and movement were implemented for the full mobile game interaction.
In the future, I would like to explore and implement other ways in which tweens can be used for this and other mobile projects, as it can be applied to all interactivity in mobile development.
Overall Design
In order to fit a narrative on emotional choices and how players can convey them, I designed the overall level to feature 4 floors, each with an NPC ghost. At the top level, players are confronted with a final selection to determine their final emotional choice, with an ambiguous ending to hint at various actions the player took.
By designing it as an apartment with 5 different layers of interaction, makes the emotional crawl much more compact yet impactful. Coupled with the unique controller design, players are not only forced to make a decision simply based on what kind of emotion they want to convey, but also must keep ascending to speak to the final ghost and understand their purpose for traversing this apartment building.
Overall, in programming and designing this project, I aimed to portray a complex and concise emotional dilemma. The aim of this project create a short and emotional narrative experience that can be played on mobile for short and thought-provoking gameplay.