Read Between The Lines

Inspiration

In the information age, it is very easy to believe what you read, and the ease of getting information has reduced critical thinking abilities of many. Our goal was to try to tackle biases by what we believed was their root cause, a lack of questioning and people believing things without coming to their own conclusions. We wanted to highlight how media, especially social media, and what they choose to highlight, shapes our perception of reality and thus shapes our biases.

What it does

You play as a journalist and publish head lines, and you get to see how your work changes the world around you. It shows how things that people read makes them biased against something they didn't witness or someone they never met. It puts the negativity bias into practice and teaches the player how a little change goes a long way. It also shows how similar groups of people tend to stick together when exposed to a third party threat.

However, you are not only bringing people together (or apart...) by your journalism work, you earn money by your work and then get to decide on how to spend it. You can bring in a sense of community and make people let go of their grudges by your own nice deeds. It depicts how even if the world is in chaos, you can always do something for others!

How we built it

As we said earlier, with passion, blood, sweat, tears and Godot, we made this game with a distinct play style where its not a story that is written for you, but written by you. YOU get to decide how your world and environment is shaped by your work.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was the time constraint as we had so many more creative ideas that we just couldn't implement, in the short time frame. Coming up with a creative idea and make it different from other things we had seen and read about was a challenge in itself too.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

How unique the game is and how realistically it depicts what happens (and is happening) around the world.

What we learned

We learned that many small things that we were doing were biased too! It is interesting to learn that how things that you are not consciously doing depict a bias that you do not intend, nor even realize. From the way we found different ways to interpret things to the different ways we implement things, this was a really good experience and strengthened our team.

What's next for Read Between The Lines

What's next is pouring more passion, blood, sweat and tears and making it even better! There are so many things that we wanted to do visually, mechanically that we just couldn't. For example, instead of the robots just being scared or angry, we wanted an event to occur every time 2 different robots came near. They would hug each other if they both had high respect for one another and show mutual respect, where as they would treat each other worse if one of them was in a worse social standing.

Another thing was items related, we wanted to add items that the player could buy for their desk, and the more positive the item, the better headlines they would get in their random rerolls. This accurately shows that if you surround yourself with a positive environment, you are more likely to be a more mindful person.

These were the features for the game itself but as for the whole game, we wish to add all those exciting features and make it a web-game or release it on Steam.

Built With

• aseprite
• blood
• godot
• passion
• sweat
• tears