Health code, please

Individual Work
2022

中文

Health code, please is a short, experimental game I made at home during a period of quarantine and lockdown because of Covid-19. The pandemic prevention administrative regulations bring a lot of influence on people's life. I was wondering how would people make that decision to balance epidemic prevention and control with economic and social development while considering humanitarian issues.

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Background

The Chinese government has used a color-based "health code" system to control people's movements and curb the spread of the coronavirus. The colors of the QR codes decide people's freedom of movement. Green: you're free to proceed. Yellow or Red: you're barred from entry. The daily routine is entirely dictated by the color shown on the screen.

Health codes show the COVID-19-related health status of people.

Red： confirmed, suspected, or asymptomatic cases

Yellow： close contacts

Green： without any record in the database

Reference

What if I am a security guard working to check the covid-related health status of people?

To allow or deny -- What choice would I make?

It reminded me of "Paper, please," in which the player is an immigration inspector. Using documents provided by travelers, decide who can enter and who will be turned away." Paper, please" was the one that influenced me the most, which is where the game gets its name.

Gameplay

To allow

To deny

Players must decide who will be free to proceed and who will be barred from entry according to the rules. When the PC or company

is broke, the game is over. Players should try to survive as long as possible.

The number of NPCs entered per day affects the infection rate and the company's revenue. The rate will rise when NPCs enter, while not allowing NPCs to enter the building and usually work will reduce the company's revenue.

When the infection rate is too high or people carrying the covid enter the building, the event "LOCKDOWN" will be triggered. It will result in the player's character and company not receiving income the next day but still paying a living cost.NPC carrying covid will only be among those not within the rules. So players need to check carefully. But carrying is random, so luck is part of the success.

Game Flow

Start

News Today

Rules Today

The Current NPC

Check

Zoom Mode

Register

Approve

Deny

Settlement

If Not

Lockdown

If Lockdown

Game Over

Art Style

"Health Code, Please" is a realistic work, so I want graphics to aim better towards realism than stylization. The game's characters and objects should depict appearances and dimensions similar to those in the real world. However, making a realistic-looking game like a movie is not necessary. Eventually, I chose the Hi-Bit art style, which reduces production costs without sacrificing the visual complexity.

Art Style

Music

The BGM of the game is adapted from the famous Chinese tune "Jasmine Flower." I think "Health Code" and "Jasmine Flower" are both "representative works" of China.

The sound effects are still incomplete, as the game is still developing.

Animation

This part of the work focuses on the animation of NPCs appearing and leaving.

- All NPCs will come in from the left.

- If the current NPC is free to proceed, he will go out of the screen to the right.

- If he is barred from entry, he will return to the left the way they came and leave the screen from the left edge.

How to make the animation of NPC walking?

1. let the NPC move up and down regularly while moving left or right to imitate the movement of people walking.

Table level

2. Make NPC face the right direction when moving.

Divide the image of the NPC into three parts and silhouette the images

Change the width of the body image

Adjust the position relationship of the images of the three parts

UI

Cursor Style

If players hover over an item, the cursor style may change to indicate which parts are clickable.

Can be asked

Can be zoomed in

Icons

When an item can be given to an NPC, dragging it to the NPC's area will show "GIVE."

Fixed Characters

In addition to the characters below, the game also has NPCs with no special settings

Aiguo Lee

Aiguo Lee is your colleague, he will tell you about the newly added gameplay in the form of dialogues every day.

Wei Lee

Wei is an older man. He cannot show a health code because he is without a smartphone. He is not a covid patient.

Chungchak He

Chungchak is a covid carrier with a yellow code. If he is not approved, he will reappear later that day and lie that his phone is out of battery, so he cannot show his health code.

Chen Yang

Chen is given a code red illegally. He is not a covid patient.

Hao Liu

Hao is an asymptomatic patient using someone else's covid test reports.

Haotian Zhang

Haotian shows up and meets all the rules every day. He does a covid nucleic acid test every day, so he always has a negative report within 24h.

Alan Hansen

Alan has a slight fever, but he is not a covid patient and has a negative test result within 24h. His phone screen is dark, so it is hard to get a clear view of the information.

Jiapeng Shuen

Jiapeng is an IT engineer and wears the same style of clothes every day, only in different colors. He always wears a mask incorrectly. He eventually got infected on day 6.