{ LENA DIAS }

Games/Software Engineer

Collective Wisdom

A cozy browser game about building societies using knowledge.
The title screen, displaying the title “Collective Wisdom” and “Team Double Jump.” Like the rest of the game, it is grayscale. In the center of a screen is the earth, and on it are four buildings of increasing height. The first level of the game. “A village...” is displayed in the hint field, and under it are several black boxes. Below that, outlines of buildings rest on grassy fields. The first level, but this time, the player has moved one of the black boxes (pieces of “wisdom”) and placed it in a building outline. The hint field reads “Found some wisdom...” The completed village after all of the outlines have been filled in; chimneys let out smoke and clouds fill the sky in a tranquil scene. The text in the hint field reads “A wise society prospers...” The next level, a factory with two smokestacks. The scenery is darker and the blocks larger. The hint reads “Exploited some wisdom...” The completed factory, which now belches smoke into the air. The hint text reads “Yet, wisdom can be used for evil.”

About:

Collective Wisdom was created as part of a Digital Game Design class at WPI, and evolved over the course of multiple builds. It was created in Perlenspiel, an ultra-lightweight, Javascript-based game engine, which intentionally limits graphical possibilities to encourage intelligent, elegant design.

Players click on pieces of "wisdom" displayed at the top of the screen, dragging them to fit in the outlines shown on-screen. By doing so, players gradually assemble buildings which come to life in animations; essentially, players use wisdom to build progressively more advanced societies.

Development details:

Completed: 2021
Development time: ~3 days
Languages: Javascript
Tools: Perlenspiel engine, IntelliJ IDEA, Aseprite

Team:

My role:

Lead Programmer

Lead Designer

Lessons learned:

When working with abstraction, use easily-grasped visual metaphors.

I ran into a lot of limitations on this project. Originally, the blocks of "wisdom" at the top of the screen were conceived as words, but given that Perlenspiel only allows the display of one Unicode character per pixel, I couldn't express many interesting words. I settled on conveying the abstraction through the text instead and— oh! Now that I think about it, why didn't I use the book Unicode character? Or, maybe, relied on a story that involves less abstract themes? One of the more emotionally compelling games was made by my peer and involved a growing flower, instantly grasped as what it was by viewers.

Don't be afraid to experiment and push limits.

For this assignment, I wanted to try to be a little artsy and use more text, having previously opted against it, worried it'd become a crutch. What resulted is whimsical, but also somewhat pretentious. And hey, what's the fun of art if you can't do a little grayscale pretentiousness sometimes, right? That said, I'm glad I gave it a shot, because it let me figure out what worked and didn't for visual storytelling next time I make something.