Social Game — Dev Blog 1

Earlier this year, many parts of the world have undergo some levels of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been, among all other residences in the UK, staying at home during this difficult time. During this time I am trying several prototypes of this term’s social game.

These are the keywords I feel throughout this lockdown, and what I would like to implement in this social game:

solitude, isolation, dialogue, and reflection.

CASE STUDIES

Firstly, I tried to illustrate the difference of the world around me before and during the lockdown, from a first person perspective. The scene changes between city of London and interior spaces.

So how can a game about lockdown be interesting to play? How can I create immersion? I wanted the game to start at some time after the lockdown had begun, since the game is not about how the lockdown started, but how this new norm of lifestyle is. However it will cause some confusion to players, as they are not the character, they cannot “see” the world the same way the character does.

To solve this problem, I edited the background story: the character’s rent is due so they moves to their older cousin’s house since he is not in town. During the lockdown the character has to manage to get food/resources and can explore the house freely, which they then discovers an untold secret about the cousin: it is revealed why this cousin was not very close to the main character’s family. This idea of isolating from family members/people that should be close to you comes from It’s Only the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde), a movie directed by Xavier Dolan.

Almost everyone is constantly talking in this movie, however that makes them even lonelier.

After some drafts, neither am I confident enough for a photorealistic (like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture) nor a simple-but-stylish (like Life is Strange) art style, and the storytelling requires some amount of voice acting (like Gone Home). I did not think I am able to go on this direction, so this first-person realism game concept was ultimately abandoned.

Left to right: Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Life is Strange, and Gone Home. They are all first-person narrative games that have “realism” as a key element.

In the meanwhile I have been playing other narrative-driven games like Far From Noise and Birds of Passage. They are more abstract compare to the titles mentioned above, and they both shared something similar: simplicity and dialogue. In Far From Noise, the player is stuck in a car that is hanging on the edge of a cliff, where they encounters a deer who talks with them throughout the whole night. In Birds of Passage, a lost soul wanders in a limbo-like space, taking taxi rides and talks to drivers, finding paths of life. In both games, the protagonist is lost and stuck in a place, and meets someone or something to walk them through this situation.

Dialogues in Far From Noise (left) and Birds of Passage (right). They both bring tranquility in difficult situations.

PROTOTYPING BEGINS

Then I started to ask myself: does lockdown not make us feel stuck? It is a situation that forces us to stop and reflect what we did before we move on. We have been pursuing for something constantly, to meet deadlines, make progress, go somewhere. What if we cannot go anywhere? What if… we are stuck in a place where we cannot move, like an elevator?

This week I had came up with a new synopsis:

Two strangers got stuck in an elevator, and they have to accompany each other to pass the time waiting for the rescue. Experience isolation and dialogue choices, as they reflect the paths they had taken that lead to who they have become.

I haven’t get into the details but at least this idea is going somewhere. The gameplay will be point-and-click narrative with branched storylines.

Two visualising tools I am starting to use: Twine (left) and Yarn Spinner (right).

I used Twine, and now Yarn Spinner as tools to visualise the storytelling. Currently I had write some simple tools to integrate Yarn Spinner and Unity to create dialogue system similar to Far From Noise’s. I am new to both tools, but both of them have clear documentation and tutorials available, so they are quite easy to pick up. Yarn Spinner is also the tool that helps making Far From Noise and Night In the Woods.

The below GIF demonstrate the current progress of the game: a mockup elevator in the middle, and some dialogue choices, with debug variables at the top left of the screen. The player is expected to play from only one of the two character’s perspective, so the branching choices will only be available on one character.

How the game is like right now. It will look better.

To be continued…