In the game Let’s! Go! Shopping! I aim to create the experience of clothes shopping for a nonbinary person. The game begins with an invitation from a friend to come to a pizza party before the player sees that they have nothing to wear! Then they move to an abstracted shopping scene, where the player must collide with clothes to collect them and can shoot out clothes they don’t want. Once the timer runs out, the player is assigned a gender based on the clothes they’ve gathered, and they move on to leave the store. In this level, the player must interact with people who will misgender them based on their assigned gender from the previous level before the player can leave the store. Then they realize that they have forgotten something and return through the shopping level and then back to the harassment level (which is what I’m calling the area where they leave the store). In this second load of the harassment level, the player may encounter other nonbinary people and they get a small amount of positive response from the NPCs. In the final level, the player returns home and tries on the clothes in their closet before calling their friend and going to the pizza party!
I think overall this project was pretty smooth to put together. It was challenging but really rewarding to put together elements of a game that I hadn’t used before – like a dress up level and using an inventory. I think based on my experience working on previous games, putting together the pieces and writing the code for most of the game was a smooth process. I had a lot of fun realizing ways in which I could make the code cleaner and clearer also, although there’s always room for improvement haha!
I don’t think anything went wrong exactly in this process, but making the dress up level took a few attempts. Using mouse inputs with Unity is not something I’ve done a lot, and I wanted to have the clothes change scale from when they were in the closet versus when they were on top of the player, which took some time and thinking. Once I got it working though, I was really happy with the level.
I’m really proud of how this game has turned out so far, and I think paying attention to elements like the level order and smaller things like the effectors, lights, and particle systems, really made it come together. Next, I’m going to add a player walk animation, make the NPCs in the harassment level look like humans (instead of shapes), and eventually add new clothes sprites and other invitations for the player to respond to! Overall I’m really happy with my game and the ways in which it’s improved and gained nuance over the semester!
