Why Emoji?

Why Emoji?

     That had to be the first question I asked when I first started making this game. Sure a text adventure made entirely out of emoji is cool and all but that doesn't really mean anything does it. Plenty of ideas are cool. I wanted to create a game that could only be told through emoji and that's when I came up with the story. If you want to play the game completely blind and dissent the themes at play for yourself, this is the time to stop reading and start playing. The game isn't very long so I recommend this. 

     Everyone played the game? Great! The theme of the game, at least what the theme is supposed to be, is communication and specifically the challenges of communication. Emoji in this case are meant to be symbolic of your character's inability to communicate with the world around him. They doesn't listen to other people completely and he doesn't see the full picture of the world. They have trouble in both their job and relationship because of this. If you were confused by the emoji that's great! You saw the world through the eyes of your character! 

     The only way to truly beat the game and reach a happy end is to interpret the emoji is ways beyond what they literally mean. Much like normal language, context matters and I used multiple emoji together to convey a complex idea like producing a great film or watching a film. The real challenge comes at the end of the game when your significant other confronts you at dinner. If her conversation was particularly hard to follow that's because she's conveying much more complicated emotions to you and your challenge is to discover what she wants. 👩 🗣️ 👦 ▶️ 👩 🗣️ ⛰️ 🕓 means (I) (speak to) (you) (is like) (me) (speaking to) (mountain) which if interpreted correctly directly spells out the theme at play. She's trying to communicate with you and you're not listening. Even if you can't fully understand them, being sympathetic will yield good results! Also earlier when the emoji make a little more sense hopefully (🍽️🥞🥓 for eating breakfast) she uses a more vague combination of 👦 🎁 which if I did things correctly is first interpreted as "She wants a gift / she wants me to buy her a gift". If you think at breakfast your character will directly spell out that they interpret it that way (👦💭💵🎁), but later you find out that what she really wanted was to spend more time with you because you are her gift (👦 🎁 ▶️ 👦).

     The theme also extends to your job where you work making movies (you could interpret the job that you specifically do as many different things). Your boss / director doesn't like the how you're interpreting the story of the movie when he gets angry and says "🎥🥉⚠️". These scenes are complicated to read but there is not correct answer presented at first as to how to interpret the scene as the character you're playing doesn't know how to yet. He's focused on the actions in the story (🔪 and  🛡️). Later if you go for a walk in the mountains and think about the couple you see, you can return to the film studio and present a better movie, this time focusing on characters (either the man, women, or the killer). Your boss / director likes that more but there is still some room for improvement. If you get the best ending by treating your partner very well, your character learns a lesson and applies it to his film making. He can now imbue his films with a deeper emotion not just a focus on characters or plot (you get to pick between love, sadness and anger). The idea is that your character, though the actions you took in the story, has learned not only how to read surface level the emoji but also interpret their emotional meaning. 

     So your character starts the story not even able to understand the world around them from a literal sense. They don't fully understand or listen to his significant other and they also have trouble interpreting the film they are producing in a compelling way. Through the course of the story your character learns how to communicate effectively in the world around him. Eventually, they even master the ability to not just know whats happening but interpret emotion from it as well. As of course all that is only properly conveyed to you, the player, because you go on a similar journey to our main character in terms of learning to interpret the emoji! That's why this game had to be made with emoji!

     So that's a lot of thematic mumbo jumbo for a dumb little emoji game isn't it? You can interpret the game how you want, but this is really the train of thought that I went through when creating this game! Games can be fun and mindless and every game I've made up until this point has just focused on a fun mechanic and ran with it, but with this project I finally got to flex my writing muscles and create a pure story-focused game and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!