About

Set in a fictitious Britain, preceding the nation’s general elections, Corrections follows the daily life of a corrections officer employed by the government-run Ministry of Corrections.The game is a politically charged narrative that comments on how good people can become complicit in tyranical systems and the terrible circumstances they may bring onto others.

Inspiration

The game is heavily inspired by the quote “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”The above quote is often attributed to Edmund Burke. It is believed to be a paraphrase of something he did say “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” This line of thought provided the concept for our game.

In search of a modern historical example to help create a frame with which to present this process, we looked at the rise of the Nazi party in pre-World War 2. The Nazi party is historically known to be a brutal and terrible regime responsible for horrific crimes against humanity. While they were supported by a large percentage of the German population. This does not mean that every German in the 1940’s was inherently supportive of all their actions. They were indoctrinated into the regime by a long process of subversion, that ended up with the populace supporting a fascist political party.

Aim

Game

The main aim for Corrections was to see if we could entice the player into becoming complicit in contextually terrible actions through mundane interactions. Further, to achieve this by slowly subverting these interactions into something hideous.

In order to place emphasis on how a person can become part of a totalitarian system gradually through indifference and lack of action, we knew we would need to achieve two things:

• A repeatably mundane action that would be compelling, and keep the player’s interest.
• A narrative that portrays a gradual societal transition into totalitarianism, allowing the player to keep detached yet complicit.

Development Cycle

Design

The core idea took the form of sentencing criminal cases within a government agency setting. By changing the meaning of those actions over time, we wanted to create a scenario where the player is doing what they are meant to be doing within the game, but what they are doing eventually becomes morally wrong.

By giving the player agency over whether they choose to succeed in being good at the game but morally wrong, or fail at the game but be morally correct, we aimed to engineer a situation that is unwinnable to participate in.

To achieve this we are utilising four core systems:

• Cases
• News
• Performance reviews
• E-Mails

By utilising these systems together, we are able to tell parts of our narrative through each seperate mechanic.

Cases

Our initial week-long prototype was focused on the sentencing and case aspect, and did not have any narrative elements. Components were developed to ensure that players could have a continous stream of new cases. The procedural character generator allows us to create hundreds of unique characters in seconds. The system generates a characters names, age, and gender, which can then be pulled into the case system to generate cases.

In order to simulate a work week, we developed a date and time system that lets us trigger events at dates and times of our choosing. At the start of each work day we construct a workload of cases. When generating cases, characters are pulled from the generated list and put into a case data structure along with a randomly generated collection of crimes.

Crimes are internally valued in order of seriousness, we use these values to evaluate the expected punishment. When players select a sentence, the value of their punishment is then checked against the expected punishment value to see if they have punished the character appropirately.

The tabs on the left allow easy navigation of the case, news, performance review and email sections. We show the date and time at the top so that players can perceive the passage of time easily, and understand that the narrative occurs over many weeks and months.

Narrative

We decided the narrative needed to be chapter based, and these chapters change elements around the UI and narrative; for exmaple, changing the severity of sentencing options.

News

The news section was the second of our core mechanics to get implemented. It allows us to post news headlines that are essential to our narrative, but also allows us to post general news. This serves two functions;
1. We provide the player with essential narrative developments.
2. We try to bury the important news among others that aren’t as detrimental.

Our reason for this was as follows,
In hindsight, it becomes easy to look back and see key events in history, but to the people living at the time these events may appear mundane and be easily missed. As time progresses, the player will see more and more propaganda and government control slowly creep in. Additionally, imporatant news articles are authored to go out to the player at set times to tell the story, and general news is selected from a random pool of news articles to cushion it.

Emails

The email system is a sprinkle of an human element to the story. You get emails from colleagues, family and the ministry to provide details to the changing environment around you. We utilise the date and time system to send out emails at specific times, and to tie these into narrative events featured in the news.

Performance Review

The performance review is part of the case sentencing loop, and is aimed at giving the case sentencing gameplay more engaging. We track the average amount of cases completed, as well as whether the player is marking cases correctly. Their performance is given a rank between A to F, and dropping to an F can trigger a fail state later in the game that sees you sentenced by the totalitarian regime in the same way you were sentencing others.

Suspicion Rating

The review system was developed simultaneously to all the other systems, as we pull in the player metrics, and use them to not only calculate performance, but also to calculate a suspicion rating. If you hit certain suspicion ratings, narrative elements may be triggered depending on which chapter of the narrative you are on. These range from a warnings from your boss about your performance, to suspicion based threats depending on the narrative chapter the game is currently set to.

The conclusion to the game was one of the last parts to be implemented. The games end states are triggered under two conditions. If you drop below F rank in the later chapters, you become an enemy of the new political party, who is now deeply suspicious of you. This state then generates random and fictious crimes. The second end state is triggered if you reach the end of the narrative. The totalitarian state is toppled, and you are arrested for crimes against humanity. A list of your victims is then presented to you, and the suffering the received from your actions in sentencing them.

Tools

Listed below are the variety of tools and softwares we used for the production of this game.

Telegram

We used the instant messaging software Telegram to always stay in touch and continuously communicate about the project. Handily telegram groups have no size limit on file sharing, so we readily used it to share files and videos of our progress from time to time.

Unity

We used the cross-platform game engine Unity to develop our game. Unity has well built and easy to understand UI sub-systems. This worked in our favour as our project is UI heavy. An added benefit of choosing Unity was the possibility of support from the staff as and when we would require it.

GitHub

GitHub is a provider of Internet hosting for software development and version control using Git. It offers the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git, plus its own features.

On account of the massive community support and extensive documentation available for GitHub, how to integrate with Unity and the simple nature of the workflow, we decided to teach each-other about GitHub and how to best use it to keep our development process simple.

Testing

Initially we did not have our narrative elements implemented in early testing, so we were usually testing individual elements. We spend most of our early sessions to test and iterate on was the actual action of sentencing cases, as this is the core interaction of the game. Through this we managed to streamline the interaction of sentencing cases.
Notably, the changes we made included removing having to scroll down within the case to sentence the character. Originally meant to increase the time it took to sentence cases, it was meant to make the process more involved and to cause stress when trying to mark cases very quickly. We quickly found this to be a negative element within the design, as players did not like having to scroll, and some players didn’t even realise they need to and were stuck upon starting the game.

Other notable elements changed in the case system was the need for more feedback in order to make the sentencing feel better. We added in a moving ‘sentenced’ graphic and sound effects to make the process feel more tactile, as well as a short fade transition to emphasise the changing to a new case.

We received feedback asking to include a bigger sense of weight and repercussion to sentencing, but were unable to add more mechanics so late in development that would have allowed this. Repeated testing of the core loop left no doubt that further iteration is required to make the game more engaging and fun.

Sound was also a big factor, as without any audible reinforcement to actions, they did not feel engaging and a bit bland and boring. By adding audio to key interactions like notifications and pressing the sentencing button, we made a solid start at rectifying this. With the help of a composer we were able to add music to the game. The music notably changes as the player moves into the later chapters, we being to create an increasingly oppressive atmosphere within the gameplay, this helps convey the changing tone of the narrative and tie everything together by appealing to another of the player’s senses.

Many players were spending substantial amounts of time, trying to figure out what elements on screen were interactible and how they may be impacted by these interactions. To make this information easily understandable, a tutorial was added to explain how to navigate the game’s UI and the purpose of each tab. This really helped to counter players getting lost early on.

We made significant changes to the narrative, as the original pacing led to a 40+ minute game that made players lose interest due to the mundane nature of the sentencing task. Players would play for a fraction of the narrative. By reducing the time between key narrative elements, and shortening the days between each chapter, we managed to streamline the narrative into something more exciting.

Conclusion

The current version of the game contains the core of what we set out to achieve. We were able to narrow the experience down to the inteded. In both the capability of the game systems and narrative, we have achieved what we had initially intended. Though over the duration of the development we realised, that to make a game such as this truly compelling, we would need to make a plethora of small changes along with making some additions to the case system. I believe making these changes will result in another disruption of pace for the game and will force us to re-iterate upon our vision of what the ideal pace for this game.

Finally, I believe we have been able to make a game with a message. A message of indifference and detachment, leading people to become complicit in actions they know are morally wrong, and shown that this may be gradually achieved by being part of a reprehensible system.