It Wasn’t A Love Song
About Cologne Game Lab and the game
I have spent my 4th semester at Cologne Game Lab (based in Germany) on Game Design faculty. Basically I learnt Media Design, but since I am interested in games, it was a must to study abroad.
Cologne Game Lab is a university where you can learn game development. In the first two semesters you can learn from all of the fields: art, design, programming. Then, you have to choose a field — I have chosen Game Design.
At the end of each semester there is a project phase when students have 2 months to make a game in groups based on the semester’s topic. In the 4th semester, in 2017, we had the topic “experimental games”.
In the team we had 1 artist, 2 programmers and 3 designers. I was one of the designers, and my main task was to focus on the controlling and make wireframes for the UI, but of course, nobody has been left alone with his task.
Concept
The game called ‘It Wasn’t A Love Song’, and it referes to a noir film called Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer). We wanted to keep the noir feeling, which caused a greyish style in the game area, but also somehow modernize it.
The game area is a room, where abstract objects have been placed, and the player’s goal is to find details about a murder case. The details are hidden in the shadows and around the game area in the form of video, sound and music.
When the player finds a clue, he can place it on a timeline — he can also organize the clues on the timeline, replay the happening, and make the conclusion.
The game is…
⦁ 3D
⦁ made for PC
⦁ explorer, thriller
Defining gameplay, rules and what we want from the player.
We had to finish the narrative design and find a controller. Finding a controller wasn’t as easy as we thought first — we used Unity, which has limited our opportunities.
We have found Korg nanokontrol2, which was compatible with Unity, so we could start the process! It was challenging to create an FPS game what you can control by a MIDI controller. We had a lot of buttons, then it turned up it’s not even enough, but the sliders were too many. We separated the controls by moves, and UI. For the UI we used the buttons and for the camera, lights and glitches we used the sliders and pots.
First, we wanted to create an inventory system which included the clues by type (shadow puzzle, video, sound, music). But when we started to build up the wireframe, suddenly we realized that we don’t have enough buttons and we miss maybe the most important interaction: with which button can we move the files from the folder to the timeline?
I came up with an idea to align everything what is connected to the timeline, except the quest itself. So the folders got space next to the timeline and we separated the sides with pictograms to make it more clear where the player is interacting at the moment.
Game Flow
When the player starts the game, this is the first view. As you can see, a lot from the screen is locked down, because the first quest do not requires the usage of the timeline, and it could easily confuse the players. What you can see is the quest bar and another bar which shows how many sliders do you need to solve the quest.
Another thing which the player can realize is the REC button in the top left corner of the screen. This button referes to the REC button on the controller and you can capture things with it — in this case, you can capture the right shadow. In the quest bar or section you can see a siluette of a telephone, what means you have to find a shadow which looks like a telephone. And so on…
When you have found the right siluette, the REC button turns green which means you can capture the objective.
After you have captured it, the red “?” sign in the corner of the siluette’s picture turns into a green check sign.
When the player finds all of the shadows in the first quest, the locked panels will be available — these are the timeline and the video player section, and also new quest appears. The quest siluettes are the same but the player has to find videos connected with the siluettes. As you can see, on the control panel, more sliders have been activated when the player has found one of the videos. With the xtra sliders, the player can remove the glitches from the video, and then capture it (the REC button won’t be green until the player removed the glitch).
At the end of the game, the player gets the full story about the murder and he can replay the happening in the videoplayer section.
The game has not been finished, since we wanted to do a lot in this game, but we haven’t got enough time for all that we wanted to implement.
Recoloring and lockdown feature have been added by Adreas Gefken.
