Game Design
This was the first transmedia project I designed, not thinking about how to create something that could fit in many different formats, but rather how to directly translate a creation through formats. The briefing was:
"Stripping the original story from its prose, maintaining its identity."
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Because of that and, of course, scope, it took the form of a story walkthrough, with very few mechanics.
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The original story I made was envisioned in a comic or storyboard format, in which there was a lot of focus on different facial and body expressions.
However, while making the game it was difficult to express feelings and moments in the same scene, because we decided not to invest time learning how to make cutscenes or work with many different sprites for the characters. Therefore, it was necessary to change how the same elements were applied, focusing on the environment and overall feeling, like for instance, turning darkness into something physical and moving.
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I felt like a filmmaker adapting comics!
Scene flow and order diagram made in figma
Writing
What is portrayed in the story is basically some of my late interpretations of my own childhood fear memories. Some specific elements like corridors, wardrobes and even trees viewed from the window became a powerful source of doubt. What is the lack of light hiding? Up to this day, that's still a very inspiring feeling for me. And it is even more valuable, because many other people can usually relate.
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For the adaptation, it was necessary to have a shorter version of the plot. That meant deciding what was essential to tell the story and how to link loose ends. The key, since this is an introspective story, was to maintain all important character actions over all the scenes, and the actions that couldn't fit were remade or changed to fit the game format, keeping the intent behind the scenes. For example, the conclusion to the therapist scene, putting out candles to be left in the darkness (a proof of determination) was originally a dark driving sequence back to the character's old house.
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And, of course, cutting off scenes, but also creating new ones to explore the game aspect and, since the story switches between different moments in the timeline, adapting the sequences to make a linear approach.
Engine Implementation
It took me hours of YouTube binge watching to find resources and learn effective logics of scripts from different people, and making them work together, but with the help of Lito Kemper, my coworker in this project, we achieved this final result.
Our programming skills are super basic and this was our first extensive experience. It was mainly based on patching up different pre-made scripts and studying them just enough to apply all of it into a cohesive result.
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That is why I use the term "implementation" for what I did for most of the game scripting and general application of mechanics, such as walking and visual hints, character animation and camera follow, player dialog, resolution responsive interface and others.
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The development, for me, was a VERY elaborate jigsaw puzzle final boss fight.
Late stages of the game in Unity