Description

The Road, 2020
Click here to play.

The Road is an autobiographical game that explores themes and metaphorical scenes from my lived experience as a queer Asian. In the story, the user enters a dim sum scene—a space of tradition, value systems, family. Once the secret dim sum steamer was selected, the user is transported to the road (inspired by The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost). This windy path comes with its obstacles. Veer off the path, and you have to start again. Eventually, the user arrives at a fork in the road. A choice has to be made. One road leads to back to family, the other, to chosen family. If the path to chosen family is selected, we enter the disco. The disco, a space for celebration, inclusion, and identity. These scenes represent vignettes of my own life and the complex navigation of queer and Asian identities.

Design Process

This project was highly enjoyable to conceptualize and format visually. I felt like I put numerous coding concepts to the test: calling functions, classes & objects, arrays, for loops, collision detection, etc. I certainly ran into issues trying to craft the dim sum scene - finessing the rotating dots and trying to get multiple elements rotating in opposite directions (will work on improving this later). The switching of scenes was also interesting to program. There is a moment at the fork in the road scene where your choice dictates how you progress or move back in time. It was interesting trying to create a visual for the Robert Frost poem (a poem I read when I was in elementary school and held close to my ♥).

Click here to view the code.

Reflection

I enjoyed creating visualizations of the scenes through sketching and working in an additive way with code to produce similar (if not exact) replicas of my sketches. I do feel I left a lot of experimentation and exploration out of this process. The game feels visually very minimal and "tight". I wonder how it could look if I loosened the constraints and made it "messier" as an experience.