One day a couple of parents started to worry for their child as it had begun to act strange. They prayed for the child’s protection against disease so they knew it couldn’t be sick.
So there was only one logical explanation. The baby was possessed by the demon.
Worried for the safety of their child, the parents called YOU, a recently ordained priest who has never had any experience with exorcism before.
So how do we remove the demon from a baby? Well, you SHAKE the spirit away obviously.
Contribution: Construction, Game Design and UI
A short video of the game, how to use the controller and the game screen
Gameplay
The goal of the player is to expel the demon of a baby or in other words successfully complete an exorcism.
The players must use the controller, a baby doll modified to fit a button and a joystick, and shake it in order to fill the happiness meter before the demon starts to manifest. Once the demon starts to manifest the players must slap the baby in order to scare it away, if the demon manifests for an extended period of time the happiness meter will drastically drop and the sadness meter fill rapidly.
At the end of the exorcism, both successful or failure, is possible to see a slideshow presentation of pictures taken of the player when playing.
Mechanics
Happiness Meter
The happiness meter is what's going to determine if the players are able to complete the exorcism a.k.a wining the game. This starts a 0 and increases according the shakes per second.
There are four levels for SPS (Shakes per second)
- Easy: 2 sps
- Medium: 3 sps
- Hard: 4 sps
- Extreme: 6 sps
If at any given moment the player doesn't meet the minumum sps a hidden "sadness bar" starts going up and as it keeps growing larger the happiness level starts decreasing until the player slaps the baby (button in the back) to reset this hidden meter.
Shake the Baby
A joystick that uses a 4 axis input, every time one of the axis is triggered a new shake happens. Each new shake will count towards the happiness meter.
Slap the Baby
Uses a button on the back of the controller to reset the sadness meter
About the workshop and a little bit about the process
The Possession of Baby Junior was created during a week-long workshop with Tatiana Vilela dos Santos at Universidade Lusófona, the challenge for this week was to learn more about alternative controllers, how they can provide a different experience with games (or even make them more performative) and create a memorable game.
Due to the nature of this game, it can only be played on certain events. This game won the University award for Best Alt-Ctrl Game of 2023.
Everyone in the workshop was given a joystick and four buttons. Me and other two colleagues saw a baby doll that was in the room and started thinking about how to create a game with those three elements. The idea suffered some changes, from being a baby that enjoyed pain to a bad babysitter that wasn't aware of how to take care of a crying baby until eventually landing on the player being a newly ordained priest called for their first exorcism. The common thing between all the ideas was finding a way to put the joystick inside of the baby.
Below can be found some pictures of the process of the creation of the controller.
Disclaimer: No babies were hurt during the creation of this game and the group does not support the shaken baby syndrome.
