Week 8 Play Journal

Before I noticed, it is already the 8th week of the quarter. I’ve been designed 2 discord bot already, and it is incredible to see what people made in this class.

The exploration in discord bot is a complete new experience, and I cannot wait to move on to the next project. The bot that I made for the project 3 holds a mystery game. That project light up my passion of making a puzzle game or an escape room on discord as a game platform.

The fact that bot can mimic human interactions by Direct Message to people and send message to the chat channel is so fascinating. I think these feature make discord a perfect place to hold a mysterious game.

The city escape room idea that I mentioned last week is something that I really want to work on, but I think the project is too ambitious to finish before the quarter ends. Also, I think discord is not the correct platform for this project, because the visual representation is too weak for that.

As a result, I want to treat discord as a game platform seriously and think about a game idea that fit this platform perfectly.

Discord Escape Room - Find out the mystery

It is hard to figure out the game title right now, but it will be a more formal “escape room” than what I did for Unknown Aggie. Unlike Unknown Aggie which monitoring chat from all the channel in the server like a creepy stranger, players need to talk to the bot directly.

I draw asome inspiration from the movie Profile.

A British journalist goes undercover and infiltrates the digital propaganda channels of the so-called Islamic State, which has been mobilizing ever greater numbers of women from Europe. Her daily Internet contacts with an ISIS recruiter gradually pull her in and push the limits of her investigation.—Markus Fagerholt

I want to set up a few restricted channels in the discord server, and the players need to figure out away to trigger the command that let the bot add the player to the server. Also, the bot will posting some hints only in that server, and player need to decrypt these hint in order to move forward. Also, with the experience that I learned from the previous bot, I will let the player discover the secret gradually and design some more positive feedback to encourage players keep playing.