dinosaurily
Arts
ARTG 129: Special Topics in Game Design: Speculative Futures: Games For A Different World
Ever wanted to hug dinosaurs? As a dinosaur yourself?
dinosaurily is a 2D digital single-player dinosaur game about found family and affection where you can hug other dinosaurs, plant flowers and stickers, and freely explore different dimensions of spacetime.
We want players to feel nostalgia and experience catharsis by allowing them the freedom to explore, reflect, express, and connect. This is in contrast to how queer people are often disconnected from their biological families, who tell them to censor self-expression and stay closeted. We want queer players to have this space where they can fulfill a queer dream through play, which may not line up with their reality. In this game, you play as a dinosaur on a night out on the town and find other dinosaurs who become your new family, and can express freely and celebrate life.
dinosaurily was made for ARTG 129: Special Topics in Game Design: Speculative Futures: Games for A Different World, in Winter 2019. In it, we were assigned to imagine better futures in which a major socio-political system no longer exists. We decided to get rid of chrononormativity, or social pressure in regards to time, and heteronormativity.
In our game, there are no set gender expectations or hierarchies in social relations, as the dinosaurs are genderless or nonbinary. When you hug another dinosaur, you change into them. This represents the changing of perspective when getting to know someone intimately whether platonically or romantically, literally stepping into the other’s shoes. After hugging, the dinosaurs follow you around, representing your newfound family.
In regards to combating chrononormativity, we wanted to express values of self-care - in the sense of being able to simply enjoy being, and doing what you want to do, when you want to. Instead of having linear progression or easily quantifiable goals, the available actions in dinosaurily are based on affection or self-expression. We were inspired by the idea of embracing and celebrating the queer beauty in error in games, from Jack Halberstam. As such, our game has free exploration of space. Instead of following a straight, clear path, players can move freely in any direction according to whatever sparks their interest in each moment. They can also subvert the space by placing graffiti-esque glowing neon stickers and planting flowers from the ones on the dinosaurs’ backs, anywhere they like. The win condition, then, is for players to freely enjoy themselves and celebrate a queer existence.
Visually, to convey a sense of nostalgia and celebration, we created our own version of a cyberpunk aesthetic. From our research, we took inspiration from Teddy Pozo, using chromatic aberration as a form of queer and subjective "haptic visuality." Another inspiration was Avery Mcdaldno idea of how exploring voids in queer games can be fruitful. As such, we filled the voids between our game’s backgrounds with flowers. (After all, some flowers turn into fruit.) Exploring voids also ties in with our theme of self-expression as a way of forming identity.
Our game is innovative in that we designed it with values that go against the capitalistic, goals-driven, objective values of many games today. We wanted to make a game that is drenched in free exploration, queer aesthetic, and subjective experience.
We are planning to update the game by adding background music and sound effects, as well as having tiny dinos that you can meet and have ride on your back. Updates will be posted on our Twitter (@DinosaurilyGame), as well as our itch.io, where you can download and play the game for free (jellolin.itch.io/dinosaurily).
