Surviving in Metaverse

Qilin Yu/ Gloria

Click here to download the game!

During the semester, I learnt a lot of new things about games and coding. I was surprised by the final result where I'm capable to actually make an interactive game. I made a Twine Game called "Surviving in Metaverse" and there are various results players could get at the end.

The game has a story background where people switch their actual lives to virtual lives in Metaverse. Some people took advantage of the fast development of the Metaverse and became "New Money" whereas some people are still struggling in the virtual world as they did in real lives. Players can choose their characters to enter the Metaverse and the only reason they do is because they need a huge amount of money in 1 day. Each one has a different situation. How will they survive in the Metaverse? Will they choose to be honest or become a lier? Whether each one gets the money or not only depends on their own choice.

The Twine Game is styled with CSS and it contains different fonts, background colors, text allignments, box display, etc. I also added a relaxing music of alpha wave by usinbg JavaScript. The Quiet Year game inspired me a lot regarding providing a situation with two different but related choices. I used transcriptions of Otter.ai since I talked to my phone what I thought and it converted into text directly. I found Otter.ai a very helpful and time-saving tool. I did most of the text just by saying it out to Otter.ai. Then while writing the historical background of my "Metaverse", I first used n+7 to edit what I got from Otter.ai and tried to edit it more by using CharNG. However, I think the result became too poetic so finally I didn't use the one CharNG provided although I got inpired by the sentences and the voids so I editted the story on my own.

I used Voicebox a lot while thinking how I should continue to build the story. I got a bit stuck while writing the 8 person's histories so I started to click on words like "Her", "He", "influence", etc. Althought the sentences didn't always appear to be helpful but it was inspiring. Another tool I found really helpful is the Oblique Strategies cards. There was one called "You are a housewife" and I converted the idea to the job of one of my character choices. Another aspect of Oblique Strategies is that it often gives me suggestions of how to do things, such as "decorate, decorate". In my case the word "decorate" stands for decorting more on the storyline and conversations between people. Cards like "Do words need changing?", "What wouldn't you do?","Mute and continue","Use an old idea", etc. all helped with my story development. The last tool I found interesting is the Anagram Generator. It was a bit weird using that because the results were not very usual in most cases. However, I picked the idea of how "events" and color "Mint" are realted with "Investment" and put this idea to my character design and the background color choice.

In general, I think I learnt a lot from every week's assignments and I enjoyed learning and playing the variety of games and all other coding programs. I found using HTML very hard at the beginning but when I practice more and more as doing assignments, I feel much more comfortable. What I really love about this course is that all the things we learnt is kind of connected with each other, especially HTML and CSS. I really enjoyed the final project of building a game and I found it much more comfortable by using Twine and CSS. I think I did a good job completing weekly assignments and actually learnt from class materials. I also enjoyed working with other classmates in zoom breakout rooms and we did a great job writing stories, playing games, making drawings, etc. I think I deserve an A for the final project because I meet all of the requirements and I think my game is interesting and unique in some ways. In general, I think I deserve an A- for this course since I'm still learning about HTML, CSS, Bisty, etc. and there's a lot for me to improve. The ability I learnt from this class will be very helpful for my further career and I will keep learning new stuff.