Gamify Yourself – Part 2: What’s Your Story?

Whether you will develop your game on your own, or leave it to a professional, you will have to get your story straight! The goal of gamifying yourself, is to contribute to your personal brand. In order to do so you will have to answer one important question: “What do you think the player of this game should learn/remeber about you?”

In this article I will guide you through the steps I took:

• What is the goal of this game?
• What story do I want to tell with this game?
• How will I tell my story with this game?

The goal of the game

The story I want to tell about myself is that I am a creative, inquisitive mind who will do anything in his power to achieve his goal. I like to be challenged and improve myself. I want to live and work in a world that inspires me. Most of all, I want to do what I love: Take part in really cool projects and create really cool stuff!

Coffee or beer
The game is designed to to provide a good first impression of me and what my interests and passions are. The player of the game should get excited to have a cup of coffee with me or to drink or a beer in the pub. That is ultimately what really matters: To find the people with whom I want to work on projects I like!

My story

Now that I know what I want to tell, it’s time to get creative and make up a story. The story may be quite simple, as long as it meets an important requirement: there must be a challenge included. Another important point is the environment in which the story takes place. I already made this choise in the previous article on this subject​​.

The challenge
So here’s the challenge: Getting rid off all negative items in the game, and get inspired in order to be able to do what I love. Negativity costs energy. Inspiration is the ultimate goal.
So what’s a good personification of negativity? Soulless creatures without will or vision. Powered by unseen forces that nobody can fight. Robots! If somehow these robots infect me with too many bad vibes, I might not survive…
You can’t touch inspiration, so I need a metaphor for that: The holy grail of inspiration!

How to win / Game over
Apart from overcoming negative elements, there should also be positive items in the game that improve me, showing some of the skills I have in real live. I can’t overcome negative elements if I don’t have energy. There should be stuff in the game that gives me energy. I’m thinking coffee, music, multimedia stuff…
Once the holy grail of inspiration is found, the player has won. If however the robots infect the main character with to much negative energy, the game is over.

The reward
If you finish the game, the reward is to connect via LinkedIn or to meet up with me. The coffee and beer are on me!

Making a game out of a story

Now that I know what I want to tell with this game, I need to know how to tell it. There are many different types of computer games that one can choose from. Check out wikipedia to get an idea of all the possibilities.

But that’s not all. The game has to be designed both functionally (what part does what?), and graphically (what does it look like?).
I’m planning to write articles on these two subjects, because they are both very important in the process of building of a game. I will also discuss how to create a lively game through animation.

Do you want to know how to build/program the game in Flash like I do? Then check out the tutorial on AS3 Game Tutorials.

Other articles on gamifying yourself:

Part 1: Introduction
– Part 3: Functional Design

[swfobj src=”https://edwardkobus.eu/wp-content/uploads/GamifyYourself-EdwardKobusV002beta.swf” width=”608″ height=”468″ required_player_version=”9″]
The game so far: Click on the game with your mouse, then move around with the arrow keys

Tags: gamification, personal branding, story telling
Geplaatst op: november 29, 2012