Overview:
In Procrastinator, the player's goal is to cross the playing field and complete Assignments. This must be done within the time limit and while avoiding Anxieties. When time runs out or the player complete all Assignments on the field, the game progresses to the next week. The player may use an Out to clear the field of Anxieties, but will suffer penalties the next week. The game ends once the player reaches the end of week 15, or when their grade reaches F.
Gameplay:
The player moves vertically or horizontally, controlled with the arrow keys.
The player is given 60 seconds to reach the other side and complete each week's assignments. Coming into contact with an Anxiety will take 10 seconds off the player's time limit and return them to the starting position.
Every 2 weeks, another Assignment is added to the playing field. In addition, as the weeks progress Anxieties will periodically become larger, faster, and more numerous.
The player may use an Out to clear the field of Anxieties, but this will add an additional Assignment to the next week, as well as increasing the Anxiety's attributes.
Scoring:
For each Assignment left uncompleted at the end of the week, the player loses a fraction of a letter grade (IE if the player's grade is an A+ and they leave two Assignments uncompleted, they will drop to an A-)
Each Out used lowers the player's grade by a fraction.
Winning:
The player wins if they reach week 15 with a grade better than an F. If at any point their grade reaches F, the game ends.
The premise of this game is to represent a typical semester for a procrastinator or academically challenged student, with all of the pitfalls that accompany it. At the start of the game assignments are easy to complete and anxiety is low, but as the weeks go by assignments become more numerous and anxiety makes them more difficult to complete. Clearly the easiest way to play is to try to complete assignments without using Outs, but the game will still become very difficult by the end of the 15 weeks.
My rhetorical goal with this game, aside from showing that the easiest way to get through school is to just do things on time, is to try and convey some common academic problems. As the player advances, gameplay becomes more and more hectic, it being harder to dodge anxieties and complete all the assignments in a given week. This makes the prospect of an Out more attractive, but using an Out lowers your grade and makes catching up in subsequent weeks more difficult, just as in real life. Outs represent taking a break to play games instead of work, going out with friends, or simply staying in bed because one feels overwhelmed. If the player does poorly enough, the feeling of watching the screen fill with anxieties and their grade drop should convey some version of the "sinking ship" feeling one gets as the end of a semester approaches and one's academic prospects seem dubious at best.
