Commedia dell’Arte is now featured on Game Jolt.
Many thanks to them for having chosen us!
#gjfeatured

Here is a little word from our main game designer about the genesis of this school project:

The common goal of making a game about stage acting came to us from a thought on the gamer’s status. It appeared to us that the player is at the same time the actor and the spectator of her/his gaming experience. We tried to express that idea by the use of the third person view, placing the camera over an audience and making the player choose the actions of an actor on stage.

We wanted to explore the roleplay roots of computer games, away from the usual heroic fantasy folklore. Finally, we felt that the trance – the flow we can feel while gaming – is not that far from the concentration of an actor on stage. Sometimes, it’s even two really close kind of experiences…

We chose the commedia dell’arte genre, from the XVIIth century, because of its accessible comical mechanics, and for its improvised nature – that seemed easier to adapt to an immediate gaming action. What caught our attention as well was that commedia dell’arte was performed in the street before being a royal court art. This brought us to a whole roster of characters and situations as well! The Italian actors – who were specialized in one single archetypal character all their lives – were using storyline canvases to improvise, like patterns they memorized. That combination of liberty and constraint appeared to be close to a video game.

In that top-down game design process, we tried as much as possible to make our gameplay stick to our theme, as we did not want to end up with a boring collage. So, instead of having a simple verb list, we introduced adverbs to add some nuances to the possible actions the player could choose. We used simple masks – the happy one and the angry one in this demo – to make the player understand the coloration her/his action will take, but we can imagine more sophisticated adverbs. At the same time, on the screen, the player can also see a plain text evolution of the verb according to the mask he chose for clarity.

We were fond of ideas coming from the interactive storytelling discipline, and tried to input some in the game. For example, after the tutorial, in the scene with Pantalone and the Capitano, you can choose several actions. They have a certain effect value on the Capitano and, when the additions of these values reach a certain peak, the character will flee by himself, even if you didn’t clicked on all the effective actions. This was a way for us to create a non-linear puzzle resolution, to bring some replay value and to take another step away from usual point’n’click adventure games. Nonetheless, like in the final scene with Colombina, we found interesting to introduce promptly some choices that will have more effect on the storyline – and not just modulate what happens between the nodes.

We removed all things that could distract the player from the action. We even thought to put timers to oblige her/him to make decisions, but we didn’t choose to follow that path. We also removed the “game over” because, on stage, «show must go on» as we say. One last thing: we really wanted the audience to react to the player’s actions. At the end, those reactions are added up by the program to review the player’s performance (with a food score, because the actors were not payed with money at the time - in this demo, this aspect is just demonstated with a video).

We wanted to provide a vivid and humorous experience while bringing a cultural value as well. We do hope you’ll enjoy it! Thanks for your attention.