Ideation

The development of Get Flagged! is done with a more spontaneous approach. Due to the theming of the game jam that this game is submitted to — that theme being "Nothing Works as Expected" — my team and I developed the game through the constant brainstorming along with the simultaneous implementation. This project also feels like the most collective work where all of our ideas are bunched up into one in effort to subvert the expectations of the player — which naturally breeds weird ideas. Some are even impossible to implement within the given time frame.

We started the development of Get Flagged! — like any other project — by thinking of ideas for the game. The initial concept that we thought of is the idea of a UI element moving instead of the first-person subject in a traditional first-person scene of a video game when a movement input is received. Indeed, this is playful, but naturally, all it is is just an idea and it is not enough to build an entire playable game on.

Before we commit to one specific idea, we tend to search for alternatives. We come up with one that plays with the video game camera, one with progress bars and time, and another with switching the player-controlled object. I find these ideas to be somewhat promising, but ultimately, it falls short in terms of its expectancy. One of the judges made it clear that they seek for games that break players' expectations constantly. Simply treating certain video game elements in a unique and "non-conventional" way does the job, but only during the first-time user experience.

In an attempt to achieve the constant breaking of player expectations, we thought of simply combining our ideas into one. This way, each stage will have a unique solution to a consistent goal, which is capturing the flag. It is no secret that we always seek for patterns in everything we perceive. As players, we expect the first stage to be an introduction, and the second stage continues on the things we learn from the first. This then happens from the current stage onto the next repeatedly. This repetition is not present in GetFlagged!. The beginning of each stage is designed to build a sense of an incoming repetition.

To describe it more clearly without being too specific to avoid spoiling the experience, in the first stage, you are introduced to the object you are controlling and the objective you have to complete. The second stage presents that same object and objective just to flip those two (the player and the flag). The third stage continues by reverting back to the first stage with an added timer that becomes apparent that it does not go down.