The platform game Meowket simulates the operation of a social media influencer account and the growth of its fanbase. The player character is an account of a celebrity cat. Each conversation bubble in array floating in the sky represents a post. Each theme in the bubble represents a different content. The player has the choice to pop the bubble or not. By popping the bubble, the cat creates a new post. Each action would influence the fan number and the fans’ comments and reposts. The player’s goal is to attract as many fans as possible and heat discussion for the celeb cat. Furthermore, to provide real-time visualized feedback on the influence of the player’s actions, I included two line graphs displaying the change in fan growth rate and fan activity.
I made the game all by myself, responsible for the visual design, coding, sound effects, and user testing. The position and content of the bubbles are generated by a Procedure Generation algorithm that automatically and randomly generates the content of the game as the player moves forward. To increase playability, I introduced gaps with random distances to ensure that the bubbles and the stairs are not aligned one-by-one. I also placed necessary additional steps to make sure that every bubble is reachable. Furthermore, the bubbles are programmed to be harder and harder to reach as the player continues.
Social media has integrated into my daily life. I browse, retweet, and post new photos when I’m walking, eating, and showering. So in this game, I want to present my parallel life in reality and social media. The game is composed of two parts. The first is jumping up and down platforms, which represents daily routines in reality, and the second one is choosing contents to post, which represents the marketing of the account online. These two components are inseparable, and sometimes the two tasks might distract each other. For example, you might neglect the content of the posts when you are busy controlling the cat to tramp over a step. Or you might get distracted by the dropping of fan numbers and fall off a platform. Therefore, weaving your life in reality and social media together is the challenge I post to the player of this game.
From this game, I learned that intention-based learning is crucial in game development. I could never actually “finish” a game, there will always be more functions to implement, more visuals to refine, and more bugs to fix. Therefore, it is essential to know what skills are necessary to achieve my goals at each stage of development. At first, I just implemented simple physics to make a platform action game with a cat collecting different posts. Then, to make the theme of social media simulation more visible, I assigned values of different variables affecting fan number and activity to different posts, such as emotional intensity, likelihood to raise empathy, and mood. And I updated the changes in fan number and discussion on the screen based on the kind of posts collected by the player. Finally, I added the main menu, a pause scene, and a game-over page to make the game more complete. Even then, I still found more ways to improve the game, such as adding sound effects and background music. All these steps seemed overwhelming at first, but when I started the game, I learned that all I need to do is to know my goals, then learn how to do it.