Written by Alex
Chopsticks is a first-person, comedy simulation game in which the player experiences a day in the life of a person. The objective is simple: do the everyday tasks of a normal working person, but instead, your hands are chopsticks.
The core theme is to complete tasks that the character goes through in order to progress. You start out with simple tasks, such as picking up objects/ eating food with it, but as you progress, players will find tasks, such as writing with a pen, an arduous job. So, players are to find ways to perform such feats in order to progress. Players use a custom controller to imitate the feeling of holding chopsticks, making the gameplay harder than with regular controllers.
At the start of the research phase, we looked into 4 different topics that we were interested in. For me, it was Food in Culture, Languages, Martial Arts, and Animals. I made the decision to go with Food in Culture, but change it to be more focused - which turned into Food in Chinese Culture. I went with this because of my interest in this topic and my experience with it. I then delve deeper into researching this topic.
When creating game ideas, I made up one game idea for each sub-topic and chose the 3 which were the most popular (from the survey I did).
One of the ideas that I presented was the Chopstick idea, in which the player does things with chopsticks. This idea was taken from the research I did: the fact that you don’t need many utensils (like a knife and fork) but a pair of chopsticks is all you need. When doing the presentation for game ideas, this idea was favored the most so chose to develop the idea into a game.
I had a discussion with my peers about how the game was going to look, as well as what scenarios the character is going to encounter. This was when Dylan came up with the idea of a day in the life of a working person. This fits within our scope, so we went with it. Ed was passionate about making the game as well, so this was how the group was formed.
(You can see here why Ed and Dylan joined this project)
Written by Ed
The core gameplay loop Chopstick will have will be that the player will be given tasks to complete using chopsticks as their hands. There will be risks of restarting the level when there is a failure of meeting certain requirements while doing the task. This would allow the player to feel self-gratification for overcoming the tasks, but also have fun with the humor behind some of the tasks that the player will complete. Completing the tasks will give the player opportunities to use the controls in the form of new tasks in a new scene, which will loop until the final scene with the last task.