Science Box
CW: Loud Noises and Gunshots (in song)
You are a rat and Dr. Skinner put you in this nice box. See what all the fuss is about.
Instead of food in this skinner box, there is sound. Will you become conditioned to spam that button?? Who knows... but there are 20 sounds in total to hear.
----- Dev Notes -----
Yeah so I heard the prompt (Non-Human POV for anyone not aware of the jam) and instantly thought about rats bc I have rat brain all the time. While I came up with a few ideas, I wasn't really thrilled about any of them. Then I was thinking about game design stuff when I remembered the Skinner Box and operant conditioning. That has rats in it doesn't it. I really liked that concept because its so closely tied to games but the original concept is a non-human pov. I ran into my first roadblock with the idea when I realized that food would not be motivation enough for a player to keep playing. Sure I could make a hunger meter and tell the player to not die but it didn't seem fun. So instead, taking a lesson from clicker games, I went in the direction of discovery. Instead of a known need, I thought an unknown want might keep a players attention while still fulfilling the basic prompt. I ended up going with sound because I liked the idea of putting fun memes in my game. This class has been hard so let me have some fun with it. Also I decided to show a possible range until the next sound "drop" because I figured while it is not true to the original skinner box experiment, it is another QoL feature for the human players.
----- Sound List (Read after playing) -----
- Mario Coin Noise
- Roblox Death Sound
- First 4 Notes of Megolovania
- Anime Wow Sound Effect
- Minecraft Drinking Noise
- Intro to Money Machine by 100 Gecs
- EA Sports but its all Es
- JFK from Clone High saying "Damn your ass fat, whats your pronouns"
- Gamecube Intro
- Bass Boosted Fortnite Default Dance Theme
- Intro to Revenge by CaptainSparklez
- Look at this Graph Nickleback Vine
- Clip of Two Trucks by LemonDemon
- Miku reads the Navy Seal CopyPasta
- Seteth (from Fire Emblem: Three Houses) McDonalds Quest
- All Star by Smash Mouth but he won't spare some change for gas
- Lego City commercial bass boosted
- Remix of That's What I Like by Bruno Mars
- Chorus of Caramelldansen by the Caramella Girls
- Eggman's Announcement from Snapcube's Sonic Adventure 2 Real-Time Fandub
-----KNOWN BUGS-----
1.0/1.1 - Camera can sometimes flip upside-down
Comments
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Miles this is wonderful. At first I wasn't sure why I needed to walk around the space to press the button, but once I had press it 300 times with my face glued to the button it made sense. The level acting as a sort of deprivation chamber drew me aggressively towards hitting the button, and your choice of sounds was equal parts motivating and horrific (Bass boosted Fortnite music really got to me). I will say the presses counter resetting for each sound wasn't entirely clear at first, and I'm still not entirely sure how to read the range. I would almost prefer there be more, clearer data, but out of the way of the button so players could be more isolated in their shame. Overall though, this is a simple idea that you have managed to knock out of the park with an incredibly elegant execution. Well done!
Miles this is super great. I really enjoy the concept and I think the fact that it made me sit there and press that button again and again so I could have my speakers blown out by the fortnite default dance is evidence that your implementation is successful.
I see you've noted you're aware the camera can like flip around sometimes, I think that + a fairly high mouse sensitivity is my biggest critique and since its something I researched when doing the camera work on my pet game I wanted to just toss in the idea that worked for me was to use something like
rotationX = Mathf.Clamp(rotationX, -boundAngle, boundAngle); when calculating the camera rotation based on the mouse input to sort of bound the rotations that are allowed. Not sure if this will easily translate to the way you did it, but I figure on the chance that it does I would share.
I also appreciate the inclusion of the range the sound could play in, as well as how many presses I've done. I think while that wouldn't be something a rat would necessarily know in the experiment, it actually adds to the feeling of wanting to keep going. I found myself thinking "122 is the max and I'm at 89, so how many more can it really be?"
Overall I enjoyed the memes! Thanks for sharing this.
This game.... is enjoyable. Very much so. I was conditioned to press the button over and over. I was the rat. I got the concept. I have grokked this.
Critique: I would decrease the mouselook sensitivity a bit. I would also like some more "I am a rat" iconography in the box, maybe Dr. Skinner peering in from above or something. A little bit more "AHH" to the whole situation I think would be a benefit.