The Cleaner

Posted on by linyuweicn
Link to download

Overview

The Cleaner is a 2D simulation game that immerses players in the challenges of game creation under extreme censorship policies. As the lead designer, Lia, players must navigate critical feedback from colleagues and decide how to create and publish their game under censorship policies. The game incorporates unique creation mechanics and visual novel elements to tell Lia’s story. During the game, players will:

  • Use the recombinative phrase mechanics, or magnetic poem mechanics to create a
    fictional game that demonstrates their creativity under censorship.
  • Make decisions that balance four scores: innovation, censorship adherence,
    commercial success, and player satisfaction.
  • Experience and respond to the social changes in the fictional world through reading
    news updates.
  • Discover three different endings based on their overall decisions in the game.
The Cleaner Trailer

My Roles

Game director: Leading a team of 19 people, I prototyped and shipped the game in 1 year. My role as a director is to align the team around narrative, gameplay, art and engineer to express the main theme of the game: Freedom of creation is a privilege rather than a granted right.

I wish players to

Feel the hardship of balancing censrohsipguidelines and the game’s creative idea

Feel the internal longing for freedom of creation in game development

To understand how they feel about current and future market after playing

To achive the experience goals, I have worked with narrative team to adapt Game Design Macro to a Narrative Guide that tracks all the game flow while providing details for events in each level.

Game designer: turn an abstract concept like censorship into a game mechanics was challenging. My idea is to focuses on continuously testing the boundaries of censorship and exerting pressures on players to self-censor.

Every time when player test their answer in the selecting page, they will receive according feedback from the team members. The score on the left provides 4 categories of the answer: censorship adherence, productivity, player satisfaction and innovation. The scores provide players a
chance to test the boundaries of censorship and accept the consequences.

Mechanic evolutions

The challenge for the mechanics is to make players feel censored while allowing them to make unique decisions. The mechanics below started with resticted questions to more general straucture of a game and landed at the magnatic poem strucutre. The final version provides a range of decisions player can make for their unique game design and also provide me a chance to apply censorship pressure for difference categories.

Visual Artist: I provide the mood board for the game and layed out all the key elements for the characters. For Artist, please see the credit at the end.

I had a challenging yet great time producing this game with my team. I wish the game deosntrated the complexities of game censorship and the impact it has on game design dynamics.

Narrative Design: I worked with the lead narrative design to establish the gameflow of the project. With the Narrative Guide, we are able to both track the submission of the game content and the key narration moments in the game. The choices that players make for their fictional game and NPC conversations will result in different NPC conversations, world materials, and endings.

Link to download
Link to Thesis Paper

Team Credits