Fear the rain

Hypothesis: To create for the player a similar emotional experience as being in the rain.

Process and Reflection

This topic was a little too wide for me to pin down any concrete ideas for a starting point. So I just decided to start building something. I started with building an animation for a raindrop falling on a black screen. That seemed a little incomplete, so I added a sound for the drop. Even now, this didn’t quite convey the feeling of being in a dark damp place hiding from the rain. I decided to look up water soundtracks and see what feelings they evoked in me. The most promising sounds were flowing rivers and the sound of rain, both very serene and calming. I went with the sound of rain. I looked up a sound track and added it to my game. At this point the game felt very relaxing. As the player you could listen to a very soft rainfall while interacting with the screen to create little drops of your own. The whole experience had a calming effect.

However, the game seemed to still have no point; no beginning or end goal to make it feel like a game. This bothered me. So I decided to make a story revolving around this single raindrop generating mechanic. As I was writing the story I wondered what it would feel like if all I could hear was this raindrop and not hear anything else. A few things popped into my imagination. Either a higher being was trying to tell me something or I was going crazy. This realization then became my new hypothesis. I now wanted to create a game where the player could affect the actions of the character using this single mechanic. Based on the frequency and patterns of the drops made by the player, the character in game would assume different things.

Conclusion

I wasn’t sure of this idea and whether it was enough to make the player get that this is what is happening with his clicks. So I had a few people playtest my game. I realized that while it was impossible to predict what pattern of raindrops the player would input, there were certain general predictions that could be made. With a slightly more forced set of input patterns, this experience would be very convincing. Another thing my playtesting proved was that when people realized that what they were doing was affecting the character's mindset, it had a powerful effect on them.

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Controls: Mouse click to play.