“Absurdity is the product, not the seasoning. The chaos is the point — the group is a tornado moving through the school, and the game is about how big the tornado gets.”
The above is a direct excerpt from an internal design document about Hijinks High.
Hi all – this is Emily, one of the Hijinks High devs. I’m here today to talk to you all about absurdity and how it rears its beautiful head Hijinks High.
Absurdity is the core pillar of our game. It's what we look for during playtests. It’s what we mull over in feedback sessions. It’s what takes a design from “eh, I don’t know” to “that’s hilarious, we have to put that in game”.
Absurdity manifests in different ways around Hijinks High – whether its ripping mega-noxious fart clouds the size of a house, traveling through size-changing wormholes in physics class, or getting abducted into Clockwork-Orange-style detention rooms that teach naughty children how to behave.
Our team channels absurdity in the way they design with the basic improv principle of “yes, and”, where we challenge each other to push a traditional school concept to its breaking point without losing the intent behind it. Dodgeball becomes a battleground. Exploring the Boiler Room becomes an adrenaline-fueled nightmare. Puddles of pee become the ultimate slip hazard.
All this pushing of the envelope has ended up with an experience that allows players to cause the most chaos possible while also harkening back to the school days of old, where everything seemed like the biggest deal in the world.
We’ll be back next week to dive into enforcement, ie the powers that be who put a halt to all this absurdity that Players can set in motion.