What were my contributions
- To document our ideas during the development through the GDD
- To design the game's mechanics and loops
- To elaborate the context and story for the character, connected to the gameplay mechanics
- To develop the level design and implement it in the engine, positioning parallax layers of assets and programmed actors
Game Design
General Game Concept
The idea of a game based on revealing memory came from the theme "Identity", proposed to us. The many early crazy talks about how this could fit into mechanics and gameplay ended when we reached the photo album concept. That defined a clear focus on developing a way to obtain a wide range of memories in a direct way, which naturally led us to using a camera to take pictures of a common and present place where we could find different life phases: a town square. With this, creating a motivation for the player to follow our direction came into shape through an elderly character remembering precious moments with photos, a common cozy moment that the team shared as a nice, cute memory.
Our main references were old flash games.
Player Functions
The player's objective is simple. Find the appropriate spots and take pictures of them. We agreed to keep what the player could do as straightforward as the objective to make this the main casual element of our design. Then, we began crafting ways to improve and challenge the simplicity of taking pictures. Therefore, the game design focuses on giving a visible and understandable purpose for the main mechanic. For that, we went deep into the relationship between narrative and gameplay.
game flow early diagram
Early tutorial sketch by Gabriela Azulay
Early tutorial sketch by Gabriela Azulay
Early tutorial sketch by Gabriela Azulay
Early album concept by Gabriela Azulay
Early Development
Because it was meant to be an introspective and sensible game, I decided to build mechanics based on our story choices. That defined a workflow for the game design.
The character story concept [Cut from final version]
It was initially a multiple level game so me and Bozano actually went all out and thought about all the stages of the elder's life before the in-game present, trying to turn them into levels in a chronological order.
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The childhood was supposed to be the tutorial and would represent a very dynamic, happy, sociable and playful character, with simple happy photos. A fun refreshing start to understand the character and the game.
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The teenagehood was supposed to be a bit confusing. We chose these to be dramatic, where the character would try to understand himself, feeling mostly troubled and uncertain. These would be the levels to tryout our edgy ideas, with melancholic and conceptual pictures.
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The adulthood was the outcome of the teenage troubles not being really solved and a more mature follow-up search for who the character is. We would try concrete pictures, with clear subjects, mostly animals and people. It was also the stage to tell our desired love story, so the later partner of the protagonist would already show up in many of the pictures.
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The golden age, the actual present of an elder who lived a lot. Here we wanted to show fulfillment and satisfaction for the previous stages. A comforting ending that demonstrate a relaxed life as an old person.
Gameplay/Mechanics ideas [Cut from final version]
The childhood
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The most interesting mechanic that almost turned into the oficial one for the entire game here was to color a black and white environment with pictures. with every picture, more colorful would the environment be until it was fully colored. An interesting twist about this one was to only show color near the level objectives, as a gradient hint. The closer to the objective, the more saturated the colors would become until you take the picture of the correct thing.
The teenagehood
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The main ones were to use a specific effect to show uncomfortable subjects for the character. This effect could manifest either as a glitch like image, a burnt part of the picture or scribbles, depending on the concept.
The adulthood
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A single idea for this one. Missing or misplaced things. The fun part would be that the specific thing that is missing or misplaced would change for each level and understanding what that was would be the puzzle. An object, animal or even a specific color. In the original concept, the adulthood would be the focus, with the highest number of levels, so this mechanic would, probably, be the main experience of this game.
The golden age
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There were a few ideas for using the previous subjects of all the previous levels, but the most appealing one was to let the player free to choose what to take pictures of, without a specific objective, just a required number of pictures taken.
These ideas were concepts for what the player would face as obstacles inside the levels. But they were all under the same player loop of investigating what to take pictures of, and acquiring a collection of clear photos of precious moments in each life phase.
Art by Gabriela Azulay
Art by Luiza Leite
Final Version
As the final deadlines approached, we had multiple setbacks and the priority was to have a very clear gameplay core mechanic that could guide the rest of the game structure, in a single big level instead of multiple. With that in mind, we took a step back and leaned into what was already mostly developed by the team and within the player's grasp.
That was taking pictures of specific elements in the levels that would be saved in a preset album. Therefore, we defined a "gimmick", to spice what appeared to be a slow paced and potentially uninteresting game, as most of the narrative would be very difficult to demonstrate. The definition was that the photos would seem to be conventional, but, when they were revealed in the album, the precious memories would show up, giving us space for more storytelling.
Even though there was already a written story, we focused on replicating chill, warm memories, that could accompany the general game feel we were looking for. Rather then telling a whole plot, we decided to transmit the sensation and memories that motivated us to develop this project's early concepts.
Having this objective set, the game design focus was to create an interesting and coherent environment with the assets provided by the artists, that could fit into the scenes and we agreed on as a team.
Engine Implementation
Throughout the whole development we had a few playtest sessions and, before each one of them, it was common practice to use what the coding developers had recently completed and set up a stage, mostly full of placeholders, to simulate what our vision for the game mechanics were.
In the late stages, we had less conceptual set of elements, with most of the final art and functional UI and resources such as the side scrolling and the parallax.
Those last two were part of the main focus in the last sprint for game design, as I would distribute all of our visual scene elements into different layers for the parallax effect. But the spatial organization of the objects had to fit the movements of the screen as the player would move around, and that required most of the hard work.
The final complements were to use a resource that Gratz developed to block the pictures. Basically, an invisible object that would be attached to other elements and, when a picture was taken, and cached one of them, the code would never account the picture as a success, even if the intended objective was in the framing. That allowed us to effectively use elements to cover and hide the objects of the phase not only visually, but avoiding success by mistake or baseless guesses and using the parallax effectively as a mechanic.