Dissonance is a puzzle-adventure game developed by Zi Li as her Master thesis project at the University of Southern California. After spending 6 months exploring different concepts during thesis preparation class, she started a digital prototype. The goal was to make a fun game that exposes people’s cognitive conflicts. The development team spent several months exploring some balanced core mechanics. Eventually, they came up with the idea of using dimensional spaces to reflect the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance.
Who is in Team Dissonance?
Dissonance started as a student project. Most members in Team Dissonance are from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. At first it was a one-person project. Starting from August 2014, there were designers, producers, artists and a musician joining, and Team Dissonance was formed.
How do the early experiments help?
The game of Dissonance has changed a lot from a simple concept to what we can see today. Team Dissonance has been through tons of failures and exciting experiments during these two years.
The earliest successful experiments include the prototype that explores the relationship between 2D and 3D. Though people found it confusing, its interesting visual structure drives us to explore deeper with 2D/3D space.
After several failed trials, we developed a prototype that connects the dimensional spaces and the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance. This was a big step for the project. Though it wasn’t satisfying enough to play this prototype, the relationship between the dimensional spaces became much more straightforward.
Later, we kept fixing the design based on this prototype. Before 2015 we finalized all the rules and basic gameplay in Dissonance. Currently, we are developing levels and producing art. Though it’s still not ready for release, we are making a lot of progress step by step.
Choose the right scope
Since I knew I needed to make a game with almost no budget, at the very beginning of developing Dissonance I set a bunch of limitations: no 3D, no action. Also, I listed out the elements I wanted: shadows and cognitive dissonance. However, in order to make the gameplay better based on the theme, I ended up using 3D elements in the game. The scope got wider after that. But the main gameplay is in a 2D world and the 3D character has limited functions. Therefore, the project is still under control.
At the very beginning of developing Dissonance I set a bunch of limitations: no 3D, no action.
In fact, I gave up on some other aspects - like emotions and philosophy - in order to explore this unique gameplay. Though our team is happy with the current demo, I think if I could have more time for this project, I’d love to let the philosophy deeper in this game.
What we learned is not only about having the scope controllable, but also keeping what we want to achieve in mind when making new decisions.
It is not easy to get the art style right
Dissonance is heavily based on visual information. I’ve learned that art style and art design need to be treated carefully.
It’s fun to explore art in this project. But making decision about art is one of the most challenging tasks during the development. We are still learning how to do art design, even though we do have a clear direction.
One of the main reasons is that the basic visual structure is complicated. We have 3 characters and 3 worlds. It’s the same as displaying 3 screens at the same time. We have some great concept art with a lot of details…
But it’s impossible to use them. Players get confused and overwhelmed easily since there’s both important and unnecessary information on one screen, and it’s too much.
Having seen this, we decided to use a minimalistic style. However, without specific visual details, players could never understand the gameplay because it doesn’t go with what people’s mindset is used to. Then we put a lot of effort in exploring how to pass correct information through visual details. We have tried shapes, colors, animations. Finally, we can only make art based on designers’ decisions.
What I’ve learned from this process is that in a game, it is not always true that choosing better looking art is better. There are two main elements we need to go for: Choose the art than can clearly show the contents and meaning of the project, and consider using a neat and practical art style instead of those with lots of details, since, as students, we have limited resources.
At this point, Team Dissonance has a complete demo of their game. Zi Li says they’ve got the right mechanics, puzzle design, art style and music. However, it hasn’t gotten to the emotional point that they want yet. They are about to start looking for funding and then finish the game. Since there’s a complete story that hasn’t been told through the game, Zi Li would like to keep working on it and offer a full game to the audience. Meanwhile, the professional audience, the Indie Prize judges, have already appreciated Dissonance, awarding it as the Most Innovative Game of the USA 2015 Showcase.
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