Emily Raphael

Controls:
Left Mouse: Accept or Reject Emails

Concept:
Our inspiration for this game was the unnecessary volume of emails that Georgia Tech students receive on a daily basis from the school and affiliated organizations in addition to garden variety spam. The goal of this game was to exaggerate this phenomenon to make a point about how much of a chore it is to sort through this spam to find the occasional important email.

Our initial prototype had the basic loop of sorting emails into "accepted" or "rejected" folders based on the the inbox previews, which were written to be as obvious as possible. In our revision, we've added a few features to give players goals and concrete feedback.

First, the player now has a friend whose mood is represented by a meter at the bottom of the screen. The actions the player takes towards emails from this friend will affect the meter, with a mood of zero triggering the fail state. Emails are continually getting pushed down the screen by new emails, and any that are pushed off screen are destroyed. The player needs to catch important emails before they get destroyed, which is easier if the inbox is kept clean. Accepting spam will cause more spam to appear, providing an incentive to not simply accept every email.

The addition of reading emails was to simulate the process that happens in the real world when emails that aren't actually spam become automatically glossed over and deleted (or automatically sorted into the spam folder). We wanted to replicate the pattern-recognition that occurs naturally through the automatic throwing out of a certain mailing list's emails. The player should notice that certain email patterns aren't interesting and start automatically deleting those, thus giving the player more time to look at other emails and scout for important, friend-related emails.

Changelog:
 - Emails can now be opened for viewing. The game is paused while a message is open.
 - Added friend meter. Meter displays your friend's current happiness.
 - Fixed: reimplemented list of emails - behaves much cleaner and sorts appropriately

Team Members:
Emily Raphael
Marc Huet

Credits:
Inbox Aesthetics: Google Mail
Spam Sources: My Spam Inbox
Unity 3D