Devlog 1

Hello World!

We're Dopamine, a team of designers that came together thanks to our shared interest in social media's effects on the current generation.

Our mission is to create a game which accurately recreates the experience of using social media, and how it affects an individual's life; especially how an imbalance of social media and regular life can affect a person's productivity. Our team of 5 has a fairly balanced distribution of skills, which should be useful for a more cohesive end product. Meet our members below!

Before Development...

Each member of our group conducted research on a particular point of interest out of a list of curated topics. Each of us decided to focus on different aspects of social media and the way people interact with it, as well as the effects that social media can have on an individual's mental health and social relationships. Listed below are the topics each person researched.

Aunonna: Parasocial relationships & social media

Ali: The effects of social media on young adults

Zach: Social media and its correlation to mental health

Gleb: Social media and its impacts on mental health

Caitlin: Social media addiction & mental health

Research Takeaways

Since we did a lot of individual research, and discussed many points of interest in our team meetings, we've written a summarized version of our main takeaways, based on our discussions:

• Social media can decrease feelings of loneliness, and give you a dopamine boost from the content and connectivity.
• If used excessively, it can actually increase feelings of loneliness, as well as anxiety and depression.
• It can create the possibility for deep one sided "relationships" between a user and an influencer/celebrity, which can be harmful.
• That is to say, how a user uses social media can determine if they will be negatively affected or positively affected. It's all about awareness, restraint, and balance.

These should hopefully give us some insight and inspiration when it comes to making our game!

Concept Work!

Now for the fun part! We found that we shared a similar vision regarding the high-level topic of social media usage as a consumer, and how it tends to take up more of our lives than we wish. Taking this into account, we created two basic concepts for a game exploring this premise. Below are the two concepts, briefly explained.

Concept 1: Dopamine Meter

The first concept was a resource management game, the environment being an internet browser interface. The player would need to complete tasks while maintaining a “dopamine” meter, under a time limit. While good for simplicity, a few team members disagreed with this concept as it went against our third design pillar.

Our design pillars being:

• Have a message
• Engaging/enjoyable gameplay
• Allowing room for interpretation

Concept 2: Sandbox Style

The second concept is also set in a computer-like environment, but rather than maintaining a “dopamine” meter, the goal would be to complete as much work as possible within the time frame (most likely a 'full day'). Challenge for this version of the game would be ignoring distractions, such as popup notifications and tasks that require you to use social media to complete them (the challenge here would also be not to get sidetracked on social media).

Provided the more sandbox-ish style of gameplay, it's up to the player whether or not they delve into the distracting part of the internet, or ignore their urges to complete the task at hand-- or both!

The message of “social media bad!!” is not necessarily what we are trying to push, nor are we saying that “social media is good”. We're aiming for a more interpretive message, where what you learn from the game is based on a individual user stories and experiences instead.

Next steps...

Going forward our team has several steps we need to take before beginning in-engine development:

1. Creating a one page pitch document to explain our idea in a more solid form. This should give us a better idea of the end product, and help with marketing too, if need be! 
2. Finalize team member roles. This goes alongside finding the right workflow & work distribution for the team.
3. Exploring more ideas for the project, since we still have time to come up with ideas before we commit to a final one.
4. Create more Concepts & Prototypes. This is to figure out the exact game mechanics & plan out deliverables & deadlines for ourselves.
5. Choosing our game engine & setting up a repository we can begin prototyping and working in the same space. We will likely use Unity due to everyone's familiarity & experience with the engine, though. 

Conclusion (Finally!)

We're looking forward to exploring this topic-- having a balance between productivity & social media usage-- more, and seeing how we can create a unique experience around it in game form! Our team is well balanced, so we hope for an easy workflow and cooperation overall. Having people from different backgrounds & levels of experience with social media should also give us some unique perspectives during development, which we're excited to learn about.  

We hope we can deliver an experience which does our topic justice, and make this a truly special game! Please look forward to release :)

- Dopamine :)