← appaday

Citizen Score, a game in five screens

Citizen Score is a game that exists as five screens, painted in one evening. The file names start with the date, 20180610, and the five were saved between 21:44 and 23:41: the title screen first, then a dashboard, then three scenes from "chapter01". The folder has no design document, no notes and no code, so everything known about the game comes from what the screens show.

A title screen painted with a rough brush on dark grey, the white canvas showing at the ragged edges. CITIZEN SCORE in big pale green letters edged in yellow, the S drawn like a lightning bolt, and PRESS START in pink underneath
"titleScren", the first file saved, at 21:44.

The dashboard

The second screen is the player's page. A blank bust sits at the top of a column on the left. In the middle, a chart headed "SCORE HISTORY" climbs twice and then falls off to the right. On the right there are two panels. One is a ring chart labelled "CONTINUOUS SURVEILLANCE", split into devices, public cam and stored data. The other is a red warning:

Warning. Citizen has expressed problematik behavior

A dashboard sketched in yellow frames on dark grey. Left, a tall column with a faceless beige bust at the top. Middle, a line chart titled Score History in cyan on pink axes, rising, dipping, peaking and then dropping steeply at the right edge. Top right, a red warning triangle and the words Warning, citizen has expressed problematik behavior. Below it, a ring chart titled Continuous Surveillance in orange, blue and purple segments labelled devices, stored data and public cam. Three empty tiles under the chart and a wide empty panel along the bottom
"citzenDashboard", 22:20. The tiles under the chart and the long panel at the bottom were left empty.

Chapter one

The other three screens start the story. In "stranded" the player is a small yellow figure in front of a wall with two old television sets on it. Both show a face. Two orange figures stand at the edges of the room, and the text box above says:

What had happened? I did not say those things. Did I offend someone? Who did this? I need to get to the bottom of this

A wide room sketched in thin cyan lines: a long low cabinet with two old televisions with rabbit-ear antennas, each showing a head and shoulders. Scribbled orange figures stand at the left and right edges. A small yellow figure at the bottom of the frame has a big yellow text box over the scene with the lines quoted above, the last words getting smaller and thinner
"chapter01stranded", 22:54. The last words of the text box trail off smaller than the rest.

So the falling score belongs to something the player says they never said. In "dialogue" the player, now wearing a cap, faces a red figure with a number where its face should be, 248, holding out a hand:

Look sir, you clearly did s.th. wrong. I can't be associated

Two figures drawn in thick loose strokes on dark grey. On the left a yellow figure with a cap and a stiff, boxy body. On the right a taller red figure whose round head holds the number 248, one arm stretched out towards the yellow figure. A red speech bubble from the red figure says Look sir, you clearly did s.th. wrong, I can't be associated
"chapter01dialogue", 23:10.

The last screen, "ninosPlace", is a room from above: a bed in one corner, a table with six chairs and a phone on it, a television on the wall, two shelves, a square box with a circle in it, and the player in the middle, in the same cap. The room is open at the bottom, between two walls. Who Nino is, the folder does not say.

A top-down floor plan sketched in mint green on dark grey: a bed at the top left, two wall shelves at the top right, a purple television on the top wall, a table with six round chairs and a purple phone on the right, a square box with a circle near the bottom left, and a small yellow figure with a hat in the middle. A gap in the bottom wall leads out
"chapter01ninosPlace", 23:41, the last file of the evening.
screens
five: title, dashboard, and three from chapter one
canvas
4961 × 3508 pixels each, A3 at 300 dpi, saved as TIFF
evening
10 June 2018, saved between 21:44 and 23:41
exports
JPEGs of all five, 3 October 2019, the last change in the folder
notes
none: no design document, no script, no code

Still rough

It is a concept and it stayed one. Nothing says how it would play: whether the score is something the player can raise again, what the empty frames on the dashboard were going to hold, who put the words on television, or what 248 is. The people are scribbles and the rooms are outlines.

Eight years later there is one thing on this blog that works the same subject from the other side: Babbler, a phone that talks all night as a made-up person so whatever overhears it builds the wrong profile.