Bitmap Game: Surviving Princeton

Proposal

I wanted to base this game on one of my greatest accomplishments: surviving Princeton University. Not attending Princeton, not getting a degree from Princeton, but quite literally surviving. I completely underestimated the challenges of the workload, navigating Princeton’s unique social scene, or how much I’d be transformed by the experience. This game has three ‘levels’ based on the Princeton experience: 1) acquiring knowledge, 2) navigating the eating club scene, and 3) overcoming obstacles and staying focused on your needs. Each level has text and transition scenes to help guide the player and communicate the rules of each game as well as what each scene represents. Pass all three levels and you’ll become a Princeton Tiger!

Click here for the link to the p5 editor and sketch.

Description/Design Process

Although I want this game to feel somewhat autobiographical, I still wanted a decent amount of traditional gameplay, especially since in hindsight surviving Princeton felt like a game that I took way too seriously at the time. I also wanted there to feel like there were stakes, just as I felt when I wanted to transfer, or thought I might not even graduate.

Levels 1 and 3 are the hardest to pass since they represent the academic and overall obstacles it takes to make it at Princeton, whereas level 2 gives the player a break and gives them a chance to ‘explore’. Since level 2 represents the social scene which one isn’t actually required to navigate in order to graduate, there the player can’t actually fail level 2. Instead level 2 is more of an experience. Throughout the game, the player is a squirrel--bright-eyed and bushy-tailed--trying to make it in a tiger’s world. Once the game is complete, the player is finally a tiger themselves.

Level 1

Level 1 is based off of a rain catcher style of game where acorns of ‘knowledge’ fall at random time intervals. As the player catches acorns, their ‘intellectual capability’ grows and the squirrel increases in size. However, there is also an academic owl representing professors hovering over catching acorns as well. If the owl catches acorns, the player’s intelligence decreases and the squirrel shrinks. This represents the missed opportunities of skipping class, not attending office hours, cheating on homeworks etc. that can cause one to leave some precious knowledge in the minds of their professors. If you don’t acquire enough knowledge in time, you’ll have to start over. The restart screen features the phrase “C’s get degrees”, which was practically my mantra at Princeton when it felt as if I’d failed.

Restart screen.

Level 2

Level 2 is representative of Princeton’s eating club (also known as ivy club) system. They are often selective co-ed fraternities/sororities where you get your meals and attend parties. This was a great stressor for me, as I’m sure it was for many Princeton students. Many people ‘prepare’ to try to get into some of the more selective clubs by joining the right organizations and meeting the right people. For those of us who don’t do so much planning for our social lives, it can be confusing and you may not fit into clubs for pretty arbitrary reasons. Perhaps you’re not rich enough, politically correct enough, athletic enough etc. and depending on the club you might be too rich, too politically correct, or even too athletic. In this level, the player is on Prospect Street where all the eating club houses are located and has the opportunity to enter each house to see if they belong. In five out of the six houses, the player will be rejected for some reason or another and should move on. In the sixth house, the player will have ‘found their people’ and play a drinking game, which is represented by a game of pong.

Example of eating club rejection.

Level 2 pong mini-game.

Level 3

In level 3 your previously acquired ‘acorns of knowledge’ become your ammunition. The squirrel at the bottom of the screen will immediately begin a continuous stream of shots fired. The goal is to hit the targets in the back to gain points while hitting the moving obstacles in the front will cause the player to lose points. Level 3 aims to represent the frantic nature of my undergraduate experience. The targets in the back show important achievements as well as work-life balance, for example “health” plus “passing grades”, and the obstacles are the things that can get in the way, such as “substances” and “administrative bullshit”. Acquire enough points before time and you complete the game successfully. Fail to do so, and you’ll get the same restart screen as level 1 and have to start the entire game over. However, I did make the point requirements relatively easy to require since this game isn’t really about winning or losing so much as it’s meant to be reflective of my personal experience.

Reflection

I honestly spent way more time programming this game than I intended to. It was difficult to figure out to make this feel both like a game and a personal experience. A simple traditional game should have a points system and three levels. The most difficult part was deciding what parts of my experience would comprise the levels as well as how to make both the game and the narrative build. The basic concepts for levels 1 and 2 came pretty easily since I knew I wanted them to represent the academic then social sides of college. However, I had little clue what I wanted to do for level 3, especially since level 1 took me the longest time to develop and code and the game had to grow somehow. I ultimately decided to make level 2 a non-competitive level with various scenes. For level 3 I later decided to make it about survival and a balance between the academic and social aspects of college as experienced in levels 1 and 2. This project gave me much more insight into the challenges of developing a game that has to be balanced in its level of difficulty in each level and how to incorporate game play into a storyline.

It was definitely interesting to compress a four plus year semi-traumatic experience into a game. Some of the obstacles and events I took way too seriously at the time suddenly seemed silly as I reduced myself to a squirrel and my life to a game. While this game will never be able to fully represent what I’d experienced, the very act of turning it into a game definitely gave me some perspective. This game made me realize how arbitrary and out of my control some major things that happened to me were. In real life, I never got to have any say in the rules, I just simply had to play by them, as if it were someone else's game.

Sources

Pong Game by Anna Wasson https://editor.p5js.org/annawasson/sketches/BQFIoo6s2
Rain Catcher Game https://editor.p5js.org/rustyrobison/sketches/-XcV62SDN
Pong Tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIrC5Qcb2G4&ab_channel=TheCodingTrain