It has been a month since I updated my blog. Within this month, I've been writing my game narrative and designing the mechanics, now the initial documentation comes to version 6.
In the beginning, I planned to design a game in which the main character killed herself at the end because I thought in that way, the player's emotion might be highly raised and the environment design could show the comparison. However, after I had my first meeting with my tutor, he mentioned that this game should have a happy ending, otherwise, the player will have negative emotions because my game is about a girl move a new city and starting a new life, my game should show hope instead of despair. I found this point is actual so I quickly changed my story. After having a few meetings with my tutor, I now have a relatively complete game narrative. Below is my emotional diagram of the game.
The positioning given to my game is to use narrative to help me maximize the player's emotional experience. As a result, I will not have a very detailed and complex narrative (like What Reminds of Edith Finch), instead, I will concentrate more on the emotions. For example, in my Level 3 (The Sleepless Night), the narrative is the character had just failed a job interview, during the night she is so stressed and cannot sleep, and then she starts to have illusions, at last, she went back and sleep. My main focus would be how to express this kind of stress and anxiety for the first half part and express calmness for the second half. Therefore, in my design, I first decided to use music and rhythm for this level, as a core game mechanics. Then I started to think about how to express these emotions. Combined with some research, I had a more detailed plan, that is using spatial, material and lighting to help render the emotions. More detailed solutions can be found in my design board of this level (https://app.milanote.com/1Qi9kG1wuiKq2m?p=cwzBhMZFVyY).
Since last week, I've been working on my prototype of level 3 using UE5. Compared to Unity, UE5 has better image rendering ability and especially the lighting, this is the main reason that I chose to use UE5 to develop my game. Here shows a screen capture of my project (still under development, models are free online resources and are referenced in the end).
Screen capture of Level 3: The Sleepless Night
At this moment, I'm still developing level 3. I divided this level into different scenes so I created a few levels in UE5 and used the open scene node to teleport the player. I will write another blog to explain my level 3 in detail after I almost finish my first version prototype within a few days.
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