Dokimon Rejects

Will people ever learn about clickbait?

Walkthrough

1. After you’ve opened the game, you’ll be presented with a brief article. After you’ve read it, click on the text bolded in red.
2. You will be presented with a page labeled “Find those Dokimon”. Use your mouse to hover over different regions of the image to make 5 different Dokimon appear.
3. If you click on a Dokimon, a sound will play.
4. Next, go to Subscriber Only Content, linked at the bottom of the page. You should see nothing there except the page title and other consistent information.
5. To get subscribed, go to the Frequently Asked Questions section also at the bottom of the page.
6. Then click the check box next to “I agree?”. Reading the accompanying text is optional.
7. Go back to the Subscriber Only Content Page. There should now be an image of a bunch of colorful blocks. Move the squares by clicking and dragging to show another Dokimon. (This one doesn’t make sound)

Design Goals and Process

I was enchanted by the cursed Pokémon exercise we did in class, so I decided that I wanted to create a bunch of new pokémon-like creatures that could be interacted with. I know that I am not the most artistically inclined, so I decided to center the concept of my project around a bad clickbait news website so there was less pressure on my Dokimon* to look ‘good’. I decided that my Dokimon should look very childlike, so I used an in-browser photo editor to edit some photos for inspiration and then I drew over those photos in another in-browser tool using a random color palette from coolors.co. 

After I collected my assets, I wrestled with Twine for way too long to try and remove some of the automatic formatting that Twine uses so I could style the page like a newspaper. It was important to me that the game created a sense of a self-contained reality so I needed to take out anything that could break the user’s immersion or other design elements I didn’t actively decide to use. So much of Twine’s formatting is hidden from the designer, so I had to use the developer console frequently to figure out what style elements were being used and were at times adding onto each other so I could overwrite them. I ended up using a combination of Twine built-ins, raw HTML code, and CSS to get the effect I wanted which was like a janky, slightly hard to look at website. 

 I coded the parts where the user actually moves stuff and makes things appear with the Dokimon in p5.js. I spent hours trying to figure out how mouse interactions worked in p5.js. I ended up being able to use class-like objects and math to make the post its move and the dokimon to appear on mouse-hover. I wanted to make them limitedly interactive to further go with the slightly suspicious and underwhelming website vibe.

*Disambiguated from Pokémon for legal reasons