In this scene I used an item overlapping a tile which were the same symbol to create the sense where the player was lured to attempt to take what wasn’t intended for their character creating a dialogue which was attempted to cause a sense of rejection. Overall this scene attempts to display the panic and irrational thinking that happens to the majority when resources are limited like COVID 19 lockdowns which is a very relevant example because of bulk buying.

For the housing for the crabs I kept it homogenous to avoid a sense of different classes within the community as I think that would draw away the main focus, The housing was inspired by the shape and pattern of shells and I think they fit the theme of the beach setting aesthetic well.

In this scene I used multiple rooms, like the queue scene in a way however they are in close proximity and the player is unaware of this so its like a trap, this is meant to cause tension and surprise to the player.

In this sequence I changed the colour palette of the rooms to create a sense of time changing illustrating to the player that this queueing process is long and tedious. I used an item to make it so the player cannot leave the room without retrieving the ‘food’ , this creates a sense of importance to the item in the game as you need it to progress.

I used a light pastille colour palette for the beach environment as I wanted to achieve a peaceful tone in the beginning of the game. I also make a clear path for the player at all times using tiles to help the player go where intended in an obvious direction. For the sprites/ avatar I used crabs, they symbolise as an animal individualism and sensitive which was what I thought i could use as a metaphor for people in this concept of tragedy of commons. While the sprites are homogenous in appearance this is difficult to create variation with the tool. I used a different animal sprite however to catchy the players attention (the bird in the first room) to encourage them to interact, this then mentions ‘the tragedy of the commons’ which might make the player look it up outside the game out of interest being infromative.

Research

I decided to do the bitsy project based on the theme ‘limited resources’, while researching around the topic for the serious game came across the concept of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ which is an economic problem or thesis which is when a shared pool of resources or space is always hypothesised to be used up and is not sustainable because of the over exploitation of ‘the commons’ from individuals or certain groups. I found this interesting so decided to use it as the base of my game.