The punjabi culture has always been rich in the tradition of storytelling, however these stories have not reached the kind of global recognition that western folktales, and myths or eastern cultural myths have. With games such as God of War and Age of Empires that follow historical and mythological events, and their increasing popularity, it is worth noting how Video Games are an effective media for creating immersive cultural content, with both and explorative and educational purpose.
This game, is made with the intention of popularising Punjabi folk stories, or in the least creating some degree of familiarisation among the youth (teens and preteens). The idea is, to create an experience that focuses on creating a level of curiosity as to engage the players into exploring the entirety of the collection. Currently, the scope of this project encompasses the 7 tragic tales of Punjab, and will surely be expanded upon in the future.
This is a jigsaw puzzle game. This aspect of the game, gives it more of an educational prospect, with an attempt to engage global audience and expanding the general public’s view on Punjabi culture.
Main Objective:
The aim is to create an experience around the Punjabi Folktales; four of the seven tragic tales of Punjab and Sindh. A puzzle game, that takes the player on a sequential journey through each of the available stories.
For each of the stories the players get to unlock ten different chapters once they clear a puzzle for each. They get to view the unlocked chapter as a text file along with an illustration specific to that chapter.
Once the entire story is unlocked, it can then be exported as a printable pdf version along with the illustrations.
Game Layout:
– Orientation: Landscape
– Player can pick from the available story banners. Once selected, you then pick a level to play, or continue where the game was left at.
-In order to view the unlocked illustrations and chapters, when an already unlocked level is selected, from the pop up banner that appears, they can select to either ‘Replay’, or ‘ View Library’
-The pop up will also show the last achieved high-score for each level selected, for the unlocked level.
Game Mechanics:
-This is a simple jigsaw puzzle game, the player gets to choose the difficulty level of the game, I.e the number of puzzle pieces. They will appear on the right hand side of the screen and the player can drag and drop the pieces onto the frame, to complete the puzzle.
Softwares Used
–Unity
–Visual Studio
–Photoshop
The scope of the game is currently only limited to a single kind of puzzle, and will be expanded upon based on the nature of the stories that are added. The game, as it is targeted at a global audience, will be integrated with an option for multilingual translations, both for the stories and the general game play.This extension of stories and puzzles will go inline with the music for the game as well, i.e using music from regions where the stories originate from.
For the player, the game will have a reward system that allows them to unlock merchandise, generated from the illustrations done based on each of the stories. This merchandise will include a printable storybook, postcards, calendars, etc. Additional puzzles will be added for these features.
A paid version of the game will allow you to be whitelisted for an NFT release of the illustration in the game, and additional puzzles and stories.m