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Please do not press Shift as pressing it can bring up a debug and/or crash screen or can crash / freeze the game completely.

Within The Other Line, the player takes the role of a lost explorer who is stuck in a cave. The game progresses with the player having to find a crowbar within the blocked in room in order to open up a metal crate that contains some items. The most important items are the walkie talkie as well as the bed that appears after the crate is opened. The game then progresses with the player talking to someone on the other end of the walkie talkie who is also stuck and trying to escape. The story continues to develop as the player talks to this unknown person on the other end of the walkie talkie. Moreover, there is some background to the story through reading the journal that is also within the metal crate. The game then ends with the player finding an opening in the room and finding a dead body next to the other walkie talkie, to which the player then realizes their mental state and lies down next to the walkie talkie and the other person’s body. Overall, this game is a RPG-styled game that tells and progresses through a story through the player interacting with objects that are within the game world. The main actions of the player are running into these objects which trigger dialogue boxes that explain what is happening, what it is the player ran into, an obstacle that the player is facing, etc. No physical skill goes into this game, and the only sort of puzzles that may occur are finding the crowbar at the beginning of the game as well as the opening in the room near the end of the game since both the crowbar and the opening have the same color as the room’s boundaries. Thus, this game is heavily story driven, and solely aims to tell a story that progresses as the player continues to find new ways to perform the action of interacting with the game world’s objects in some way. The most important part of the story, though, seems to be the tailing end of it where the character is questioning why they did what they did to ultimately come to the fate of death. Moreover, why they had the walkie-talkie in the first place and its purpose were the main questions. This open ending leads the player to interpret the story in many ways after the game has ended, such as trying to figure out this potential purpose and along with the true meaning and/or moral of the story. Considering the high emphasis on the story, it would only make sense for the player to assume that there is some sort of deeper takeaway from playing this game due to the open questions that the ending implicitly and explicitly poses. Altogether, The Other Line provides the player with a gameplay experience that leaves the player focused entirely on the story, and considering the game’s loose ending, purposely leaves the player pondering their gameplay experience and interpretation of the story. Thus, it would only make sense for the player to play the game once more to either confirm or deny end game thoughts in order to answer the questions of the late game story.

Burger Tetris is very similar to the classic game of Tetris, where the goal of the game is to reach the highest score possible by manipulating the position of random shapes within the playing field. The two main actions within the game are movement and manipulation, all in light of strategically executing these actions such that a high score can be achieved where score is achieved once a row of parts of the shapes are formed. Considering this, there is more emphasis on strategy than the physical interaction of the player with the controller. I guess one could say that spamming shape manipulations at the last second before a shape sits in its permanent position once it collides with an unmovable shape already place could be a skill, but overall, the strategy lies in assuming where to place these new shapes on each turn and doing this quick enough such that this does not need to happen. Moreover, this strategy follows from the randomness of the new shapes that are placed into the playing field. With only one shape able to be placed per turn, with essentially a limitation on the time needed to place the shape determined by the height of the already placed shapes, the notion of quickness is also factored into this strategy. In terms of completion of the game, there is no goal. With just a high score in mind, the game sets the player up either to compete against themselves in terms of achieving a new high score or competing against others. Considering the latter, this goal of a high score allows there to be created games within this game, such as tournaments being held where money/prizes may be at stake or just friendly competitions among friends where friends may compare each other’s score for bragging rights. Furthermore, it gives players incentives to return to the game in order to perfect their strategy of quickly adapting to the randomness in the shapes that are placed in order to achieve high scores. What may not be as simple as this goal, though, is the communication of the controls of the game. For players who may not have played the original Tetris, the actions of this game may not be clear. Not all of the verbs are accounted for on the right side of the screen where there are only labeled three buttons that a user may press for things that are mainly related to the game’s logistics. There is also no sort of method of teaching the player the controls, and since this game has no level system where difficulty progression, an up front approach to explaining the controls would have been helpful. Thus, it may take time and frustration before unfamiliar players can realize these controls or understand how to score points. Altogether, Burger Tetris is a solid take on the original Tetris, and is very familiar in all aspects such that players who have played the original Tetris can easily join in on the mindless fun that is stacking blocks, creating rows, and scoring points.

Gravity Flip is a level-based puzzle style game where a player has to maneuver some sort of alien-frog character into hitting a portal, all under the constraints of gravity. This notion of gravity employed in the game comes in the form of the player’s movement increasing in speed once the player travels in any direction for a specific period of time. What I mean is that if you press “d” to travel right, you will travel right, and if you do not press another key within a certain amount of time, the speed of the alien-frog will severely bump up and go pretty fast (at least relative to the levels). Regarding the puzzles, these portals require a precise use of the movement to hit, all under the constraints of having the player move around barriers that if the player hits will reset the player. Moreover, the player cannot simply travel along the border of the screen since hitting the border of the screen will cause the player to reset the level as well. With this main verb of movement under the constraint of gravity comes some strategy in the rule that the gravity only severely increases the player’s speed after a specific period of time. What this means for the player is that they can strategically continue to press keys in order to change directions such that they move very slowly throughout the level since they are pressing these keys before the gravity essentially “kicks in.” Although this may seem simple, this does require some skill both due to the preciseness of the spamming of the directions in order to move slowly along with how narrow some of the paths are to hitting the portal. I found also that players can simply spam the key in the same direction that they want to move in which will also reset this timer before gravity can kick in; however, this is still not trivial as if you are not spamming the directional key consistently you will have gravity affect you and the alien-frog will speed up. Regarding the levels, the levels increase in difficulty as the player progresses through the game. Starting out with a very open level and leading up to a very narrow level not only requires the player to master the verb of gravitational movement before reaching latter levels, but it allows the player to ease into this mastery in the sense that the player can learn the movement under looser constraints and progress as they move through the levels. Overall, these five distinct levels implicitly teach the player how to control the player better, and are essentially “teaching” the player better use of the controls through progressively hardening the constraints. Beyond this, there is no story beyond the alien-frog having to move through levels along with the fact that this occurs in space. Thus, Gravity Flip is solely a level-based puzzle game that intends to allow players to solve the puzzle of hitting the portal under the constraints of gravity affecting movement.

Within Bird Fight, the two main verbs that are used are shooting and moving. Although shooting directly progresses the game forward in terms of hitting the opponent and winning a round, the use of movement in the game is a direct “counter-attack'' to this progression where players can dodge the other opponent’s shooting. Considering the multiplayer aspect of this game, these two verbs correlate with the competition between players within the actual game but also between players who are sharing a keyboard. This heavily reminds me of the share controller feature in Overcooked where two players can each control their own characters with half of a controller when playing. However, instead of the co-op nature of Overcooked, Bird Fight is essentially a deathmatch, so fighting for hand space on the keyboard or fighting for seeing the screen when sharing the keyboard are also factors that may affect players successfully executing these verbs and succeeding in winning the game. I would also like to point out that the game space is just a simple open rectangle that players are limited in their movement within. Without any sort of cover or essentially a “map” that players can try to utilize to their advantage, the playing field within this game only allows for pure player skill in order to achieve success. For example, the only possible way to dodge a bullet is to use movement as there is no interplay between bullets of opposing birds colliding as they go right through each other. Regarding bullets, there is also some sort of strategy employed through the limit of only eight bullets per player on the screen / within the playing field at any given moment. If this was not the case, I can only imagine a game where each player violently moves up and down shooting as many bullets as possible in order to create a wall of bullets that will hit the opposing player no matter where they move. With this limitation in play, it seems that bullet placement is more strategic, despite the infinite capacity of bullets. What I mean is that players can choose to leave the current bullets in their current trajectories on the screen; however, if they decide that maybe these are going to do nothing, you can cancel out all of the bullets on the screen by shooting a total of nine, and once the ninth bullet is shot, the original eight bullets disappear. Players may also strategically push opponents to areas near the edges of the screen such that they can shoot an infinite amount of bullets as once the eighth bullet is shot after spamming the shoot control, the first bullet shot is already off of the screen. Beyond this, there is not much to the game regarding a story or context besides the mars-ish background that is used in the game. Altogether, Bird Fight is a very minimalistic game of pure “one-v-one” competition through the use of a minimal number of verbs, a limitation on bullets, and empty playing field.

Prompt 2: Describe the challenge of the game as if the designer was working to thwart you.

This game wants you to lose because otherwise the game would last forever. Because this game involves seeing how many times a player can bounce a ball off of a red platform before they mess up and fail to bounce it upwards, if there was no intent for the game to make you fail, the player could easily bounce the ball on top of the platform forever. Moreover, there would be no skill that comes in getting a high score for this game if the game did not want the player to lose. So, in order to make the player lose, this game employs randomness in the direction that the ball comes off of the red platform as well as through the placement of the green vertical bar in the middle of the area where the ball can bounce above the red platform. Thus, these abstract forces that are the randomness in the direction of the ball coming off of the red platform make victory difficult because these directions include directions that are nearly impossible for the player to account for and move the red platform in time to bounce the ball on it again. Overall, the game wants the player to have skill in moving the platform in a way that can account for these changes in directions since this force intends for the player to lose. Lastly, I would say that there is nothing within the game that wants to help you because the whole point of the placement of the green vertical bar and the randomness in direction intend to make the player lose. Thus, the player must try to avoid the green vertical bar as much as possible while accounting for bouncing the ball on the red platform in light of the random directional bounces of the ball off of it. This is because if the ball hits the green vertical bar, especially the bottom of it, the ball starts to bounce downward super close to where the red platform resides, even if the red platform is directly below the green vertical bar. With that said, the optimal plan of action is to try and bounce the ball either to the left or right of the green bar.

Prompt 1: Describe the central uncertainty in the game.

Within this game, what makes me unsure of victory is the color of the next block that I am going to place. More so, I am unsure of victory also because of the guessing and placement strategy that I employ on each turn. Instead of struggling with physical skill, I would say that choosing the correct strategy of guessing and placement is the key to mastering the difficulty that this unsureness creates in achieving victory. More specifically, within this game, the source of randomness mainly comes into play after a certain number of distinct colored blocks are placed into the playing field by the player. Then, there exists a randomness in the repeated blocks that are placed after this distinct number of colored blocks is achieved that makes the game more complex than simply guessing. Moreover, there is an extra complexity in how the blocks lie in the playing field after they are placed. Sometimes blocks are knocked out of the playing field and remain fully intact while other blocks are split in half or even stacked. This other source of randomness also leads the player to strategise where to place blocks, such as strategically placing new blocks where many different colored blocks overlap. Furthermore, this adds a source of extra complexity where the player has to strategize how blocks may be split based on the current placement and/or split of the blocks that are in the playing field. Overall, this splitting is hard to perceive because of how random this splitting is. After playing through the game multiple times, I could not figure out why certain blocks split the way they did or why some blocks stacked and some did not. Also, I did not find any pattern as to why certain blocks were split instead of simply knocked out of the playing area. Lastly, this game has very slow movement of the blocks, and since the game only allows the player to place a new block once the block just placed reaches the ground, this movement speed really does not matter in trying to achieve and/or master victory within this game.

Prompt 4:

The kind of space that Hop takes place in as some sort of cavern or cave. Considering that this game is a 2D platformer, this cavernous space is alluded to through the rocky areas hanging from the ceiling as well as drooping from the platforms. Furthermore, this space is characterized vertically where because jumping from platform to platform is important, the space seems to emphasize verticality, specially vertical caverns or caves. My associations with that space is that I have seen caverns and caves before, so the rocky areas that are used immediately led me to think about how this space is in fact a cavern or cave. Before I started playing the game, I imagined that this game would involve platforms of some sort as well as an emphasis on the verticality of the player’s movements through vertical spaces. This is because hopping is essentially jumping, and it would only make sense that jumping would be important in the game since it was included in the title. Moreover, I also imaged this space because of the game Doodle Jump. Considering that Doodle Jump is a game where the emphasis is jumping upwards and it is also a 2D platform, I feel like I implied from the name Hop that it would be similar due to the popularity of Doodle Jump. Lastly, the kind of atmosphere that the game creates is very wholesome in a sense. Although you start out in a scene with a dark background and are always in a cavern or cave within the game, you are essentially collecting bunnies in a cavern or cave which for some reason reminds me of saving lost bunnies. The atmosphere also feels somewhat welcoming especially because of how bright the bunnies are and how happy the bunnies look, especially in the dark scene.

Prompt 1:

In the game Alien Dungeon, space is organized in a non-constant way. There are both scenes with high ceilings that involve many platforms, and there are also scenes with low ceilings and minimal platforms. Within each scene, these platforms, or just the ground, is organized in such a way that they lead you to an exit somewhere else within the scene, whether that be climbing upwards to find this exit or just walking along the ground. What this means is that they are either on the ground level within the scene or are somewhere within the scene that is only accessible through climbing. Considering that the speed of the character is very fast and the height of the jumps of the character are really high, I would say that the character feels most natural in scenes where the space is organized by highly separated platforms. In contrast to this are the scenes with the low ceilings where the player constantly hits their head on the ceiling if they jump. Moreover, the character feels most natural in the “wider” scenes, especially the first scene in the very large open dungeon space. The more “narrow” scenes, considering that this is a 2D platformer, would be the scenes with the low ceilings in small dungeon spaces that are almost like hallways to other dungeons. Some real world analogues are running and jumping; however, these feel very fictional compared to real life with how high and fast these runs and jumps are in the game compared to real life. Specifically, the jumping of the character relative to the character's height is highly unrealistic. The space within this game is continuous as the character is not limited to certain positions and certain moves. The player can run and jump around the scene essentially anywhere as where the character is depends on the left and right as well as jump input from the player. Lastly, the player does collide with things such as the ground, wall, and the ceilings, from which they simply bounce off. The player also collides with aliens, and these aliens sometimes squish or sometimes produce dialog or an emote. The trigger in this case would be running and jumping into the trigger area of these aliens that are over the space that the alien alone occupies.

Prompt 4: Drawing on Brian Upton's definition of narrative play, describe how your process of anticipation and interpretation.

In The Laughter, the kind of uncertainty that a passage provoked mainly revolved around questions such as “what could be” regarding what could be of the player if the player performed certain actions. This mainly had to do with progressing the player’s job status and efforts of getting there, so the uncertainty had to do with what could be if the player took certain actions to better their career. The possible directions that the game suggested in achieving the player bettering their career had to do with either picking up a call from an unknown caller ID or not picking up a call from them. Moreover, it tasks the player with deciding to stay safe and take a familiar direction based on gut feelings and context clues or taking the desperate and potentially unsafe route. In light of the choices that you make, the game rejects the choices that you did not make very slightly. What I mean is that you usually have to make a certain decision more than twice in order for the story to progress in that direction. For example, getting off of the bus to go to the warehouse: The game asks you multiple times whether you want to get off. This for sure foreshadows how this may affect your future, as getting off the bus leads you to a death that is described by the red blinking text of the text box within the scene that follows. In light of asking you twice, the game also gives you options to return to the previous state multiple times, overall not making it as obvious as what is going to happen next as certain choices may lead you in circles. I would say that the expectations regarding second guessing and common sense were expectations that the game drew on from ordinary life. Second guessing is mainly presented through the aforementioned talk of mentioning choices multiple times and common sense is presented through the description of the environment and the reality of the situation, such as taking a too-good-to-be-true job in a sketchy area of town. I would say that this game does not really subvert these expectations, but goes along with them, as choosing the more obviously dangerous option leads you to death, and playing safe does not.

Prompt 2: Describe how the passages are organized.

In Prom Queen, the player has options almost immediately after the story starts. Moreover, these options continue within almost every scene after the first choice that you make, which each new scene with its own options cumulatively reflecting the options that you previously had. Furthermore, the options within each scene are very polar. There are especially cynical options that involve performing morally questionable activities, and there is also the option to simply do nothing. With how straightforward these options are, it is relatively easy in the context of just common sense to understand where a link might directly take you; however, this straightforwardness is turned on its head in the grand scheme of things when it comes to becoming the prom queen at the end of the game. Doing nothing is simply doing nothing, although the consequences of doing nothing at the end of the game may be different depending upon when you do nothing. Also, more cynical options result in others, say other students, questioning your morals flatout; however, more secretive cynical actions without other students’ knowledge does not affect anyone but the player themself through the player knowing that they did something unfair. In the way that the story is built around performing certain actions, you can get back to where you came from by running out of actions to perform based on the previous actions that you chose to perform. In the case that you run out, you simply do nothing. This is probably to emphasize that you exhausted what you can reasonably do and that you only have the choice now to sit back and let your influence unfold before prom. Thus, I would say that you want to get back to where you came from, especially if you have not exhausted all of the possible options as then you can have a better chance, (hopefully), to become prom queen. Altogether, I would describe the shape of the overall story as very as somewhat similar to that of a gauntlet with much backtracking. Essentially, there is a straightforward end goal of becoming a prom queen as well as a start, and with going back to where you came from, backtracking for sure exists. Moreover, this shape is connected to the ideas of the story as you have a limited amount of time to become prom queen with becoming prom queen as the end goal. Moreover, the idea of performing certain actions and going back to where you came from in reconsidering other options that you may perform heavily involves backtracking. Together, this is why I would describe this shape as connected to the story.

Prompt 4: Describe when and how the game feels uncertain.

Throughout playing this game, I found myself mainly trying to discover how to use the tools that were within the interface. More specifically, I was trying to understand what meant what since there were no labels and sort of misleading depictions of what each tool did. In the end, I have to say I was somewhat surprised with what tools are represented by what in the interface, but also not as surprised with others. For example, the red, blue, and green boxes clearly seemed to depict colors considering that the base color is black; however, once figuring this out, I was confused as to why the yellow box did not change the color to yellow. This was easily fixed, though, upon realizing that clicking the yellow box changes the tool from a smooth brush to a sort of line brush where vertical lines are drawn when you click and hold. Another example would be brush size, where the left black squares that are of increasing size seemed simply intuitive when it came to predicting that this meant a bigger box means a bigger brush; however, once again, the two small black boxes between the green and yellow squares at the top left me very confused. Clicking either of these black boxes seems to change the brush from one line to a double line where two lines are drawn, one above the other, when you draw on the canvas. To my knowledge, you can click either of the boxes and it changes to the double lines, and if you click either of them again, it changes your brush to the previous brush you were using. Altogether, I was very surprised and confused about the yellow and double black boxes, especially because of the ambiguity in clicking the double black boxes. On the other hand, I feel like I was also trying to figure out what to create. The double black lines and limitation on colors to red, green, blue, and black along with the vertical line brush made me think of a child’s drawing of a roller coaster for some reason, so I ended up drawing some sort of roller coaster at a theme park. I have to say, it looked pretty similar to what I thought in my head, and my expectations for the double line tool were exceeded through using it to draw the coaster. I also have to say that the only skill that it took to actually do this though was to ensure that the vertical lines were of the right height and actually looked vertical as I tended to move the mouse side to side when drawing. Altogether, I felt like the main mystery and sort of “randomness” lied in the experience of using the tools for the first time and trying to understand what everything does; however, once you understand this, you understand that this is simply a system of code that is actually consistent but is working in a way that is different than the interface may first appear to work.

Prompt 2: Describe something you really want to do, but can't.

Something that I really wanted to do was change the brush size to a size that was in between the sizes that were predefined. Considering that there is no slider but simply five predefined buttons to choose a brush size, there is no possible way to modify your brush size to anything other than these predefined values. I also really wanted to be able to pick any color I wanted; however, it was the same case where there were a finite number of buttons for a finite number of colors. I think that this would be an easy thing to add, as the P5.js documentation has multiple examples of how to use and create sliders. With how solvable of a solution this is, playing the game simply evoked emotions of questioning as to why along with emotions of confinement with how limited the game is in this regard. Moreover, I wish I was having emotions that inspired me to just draw, but I ended up internally complaining about the lack of capabilities that the game offered. I feel, though, that this can be on purpose for a good reason. With confinement, the designer might be challenging the player to see how creative they can play under these constraints. Moreover, this might be destructive to players seeking unlimited freedom and who desire emotions of creativity and freedom; however, to players seeking a challenge, this might be an opportunity to prove their skills, thus creating this underlying notion that there is somewhat a goal of the game due to this confinement.

Prompt 5: Describe how the images, sounds, and writing change your experience of a puzzle.

The game Aliens! Communicates its rules and goals by ordering levels by increasing difficulty in both terms of understanding the rules and goals of the game and actually how to execute the rules in order to reach the goal. The game’s first level limits you to having to move the space ship over the cow which allows the player to realize the rule of picking up the cow. Moreover, it also allows you to see the rule that you start picking up the cow before you are one space above it. In other words, the cow starts hovering towards the spaceship as the spaceship moves down instead of having to place the spaceship exactly one space above the cow in order to pick it up. Also, through the linear progression of the level to the right with the large open space as well as the fact that there is only one more sprite in the level, you realize that the goal is to put the cow in the barn. You can also put the cow into the barn multiple ways due to the space above the barn, in which you can either put the cow in from the top or the side which communicates the rule of how to put the cow into the barn. Altogether, more complex rules are uncovered through later, harder levels; however, these rules, such as the rule of the teleportation box, are presented similarly to the first level through limiting the players movement in order to force them to undergo a teleportation and understand the rule. Overall, this direction of attention is very profound through the way the levels are built and these restrictions on the movement. I would say that without this limitation and more freedom in the level, it would be a tiny bit harder to understand the rules and furthermore the goal at first. I would say that the most intriguing aspect of the game is the sound. The noise that is made when the spaceship grabs a cow and is moving upwards makes me want to keep moving the spaceship around and furthermore progress through the levels to continue to drive it. Without this sound, I would definitely feel a lack of feedback based on my physical inputs to the game and would for sure not enjoy playing the puzzles as much. Lastly, I would say that this game does not have any explicit story as there is simply an alien putting the cows back into the barn. I mean, maybe there could be a story that this alien is a good alien and feels bad for the cows, so instead of stealing them, there is this sort of role reversal and good samaritan aspect of the game that shows this good side of the alien in the spaceship. I would not necessarily say that I feel like a good alien playing this game though, especially without the explicitness of a concrete story throughout solving the puzzles, which leads me to not feel any identification with the game, alien, or spaceship.

Prompt 4: Describe what it was like solving a single level (tell us which level!).

The level that I am going to talk about solving was level 4, the first level that really made me stop and think about the rules in the game. The first thing that I tried to do to solve this puzzle was to walk over all of the darker spots on the floor once and then zig zag from the top row to the bottom row over all of the regular lighter brown spots. My strategy was almost aimless as I was just walking over every tile of the level and hoping that it would mop up the entire floor. I tried this multiple times because of how this worked for the more simple, previous 3 levels of the game. This led to me having to undo the level multiple times and realizing that stepping over all tiles in a level simply does not allow you to win due to the gaps between spots that are left. Furthermore, I realized the rule that in order to mop up all of the spots, you must not leave any gaps in the floor where there were previous dirt spots first. This led me immediately to work backwards from my previous strategy. I decided to still get rid of all the darker spots first, and then once the gaps were created when walking from one patch of darker spots to the other, filling those gaps in again with lighter brown spots and then walking over the entire remaining patch of lighter brown spots. Moreover, it seemed like it was easiest to simply create multiple rows and/or columns of spots together instead of trying to walk in straight lines as this grouping allowed for moving in a zigzag motion. Lastly, considering that I have played this level multiple times, I know that there are many solutions to the problem as I took many different paths when solving the level. Overall, I spent the longest amount of time on this level in order to figure out the rules in the game and how to use the rules to manipulate the tiles in order to create a solvable path. With that said, subsequent levels were much easier and faster to solve.

The Science Fair Project: Prompt 1: Describe how the choice of colors works in the game.

Within The Science Fair Project, the color of the avatar, sprites and other interactive objects are depicted by the color white. Within every room of this game and across every color scheme, white clearly stands out which leads the player to assume the interactive capabilities of those things colored this way relative to other colors within the rooms. Within the house, the borders of the rooms as well as non-interactive details of the rooms are colored in dark red, and a light brown background is throughout. In general, these two colors are somewhat similar and do not necessarily contrast each other. The light brown background color allows the dark red to stand out, but not too much, which allows the house to feel dark and not as cartoony or fake as say a dark straight black would create. When stepping outside, the grass background is a muddy green with dark gray boundaries, bike, car, and other details. The contrast between these two colors is pretty prominent, and it truly differentiates from what is important and what is not in the scene. Moreover, these dark grays are harsher to look at than the colors of the house, and almost make the outside objects created by it bland and unimportant due to the prominence of the white of the interactive sprites. Lastly, the store has a light gray background with a black outline for the counter and cashier. The contrast is not that great between the black and gray and the white and gray due association of gray with both colors since it is their mix; however, the black and white contrast is prominent. This overall scene seems very bland and almost tells the player to hurry and that there is not much to do within the room other than to buy the science supplies. Altogether, the colors between the rooms do not associate that much besides the white as well as the gray from the outside and at the store. The contrasts of the house’s colors compared to the contrasts of the outside colors and store colors make the house seem more important and realistic with the not-so-cartoony look and convey this sense of exploration due not only to the rooms but to the use of color in showing where hallways, doorways, and overall exits may be. Overall, in each room there seems to exist one background color that is either complemented by or not complemented by the secondary color, a secondary color that forms other non-interactive objects which are easily differentiated by interactive objects due to the prominence of the white against every color within every room of the game.

Deep: Prompt 3: Describe how the rooms are organized.

In Deep, the rooms are organized in such a way that makes the game somewhat of a vertical-scroller (a play on the words “side-scroller” which defines horizontal, left-right, mostly 2D games). In order to do this, each room is somewhat of a similar layout with a background of water and vegetation lining both the left and right sides of the screen. This lining along with the open spaces both on the top and bottom of most rooms, (besides the beginning and ending rooms), allow the player to understand that the exit is either going upward or downward. Some of these open ocean spaces contain vegetation close by, but their exit would be implied by previous rooms that contain more open spaces. The transition that occurs when the player exits a room is the same with the player advancing vertically upward or downward one space and the camera on the player staying on and sliding from one room to the next. This one space advancement seems to be because of the long progression to the bottom of the ocean which is somewhat realistic with the true depth of real oceans. These rooms are also organized by depth, which is alluded to by the color of the ocean in later rooms continually getting darker. Along with getting darker, later rooms are much more open with a lack of vegetation and include more sea creatures. The conversation where the final exit occurs after is instantiated by the player walking vertically upward into the large creature in the last room, overall mimicking the vertical exits of prior rooms which allows the player to easily understand how to talk to the creature. Altogether, the organization of this game’s rooms allow the player to conclude movement and progression, and combined with the one space jumps between exits and a consistent camera without fading during transitions, understand that this game is trying to simulate the downward, vertical progression into the deep depths of the ocean.