Trailer footage
Summary: A nightmare adventure about following a young teenage boy to overcome his past guilts.
Explore Alex's past memories of the places he spent with his love one and help him overcoming his guilts and self doubt, which is the key of making him a better person and move on with life!
Combat Design Contribution
The dialogue conversations mechanics between the player and enemies are based on emotions as the effectiveness of the damage:
Player has 4 emotions which include: [Rationality/Love/Hope Acceptance] while enemies have 5 emotions[Delusional, Hatred, Self Loathing, Despair/ Righteousness]
Access the document here for more detail information about the combat & Narrative
Thought process for combat design: I made the combat system being turned based conversation based on emotions is to further reinforce this importance of communication and when talking to human, there is no certain way that you will always make people happy therefore the enemy HP needs to juggle in a certain treshold where sometimes you can accidentally unplease people so you have to please someone or the otherway around.
Narrative Contribution
The game is heavily inspired by the 5 stages of Guilt and for the project I break it down into 5 different levels to showcase how the main protagonist is slowly going through his problem within his nightmare by facing the family members who pass away.
Access the document here for more detail information about the combat & Narrative
Thought process for narrative: When I'm involved in this project is during 2021, which is when the corona virus (COVID) at its peakest moment where so many people including myself lost somone close to us and regretted not being able to tell them how much it misses them. Therefore, when I was coming out with the concept of the game, I wanted to use this opportunity to try to relate to players that it is not too late to tell your family that you love them. I decided to do some research about guilt and stumble upon the 5 stages of guilt and implement this concept into the game.
Level Design Contribution
Early concept for Level 1
Second concept for Level 1 Tutorial
Finalised Level 1
Level Design Thought process: Initially the level started off at the player's bedroom as this was the place that the character went to bed and spend most of his time griefing for his family. Since this is a dream, my first thought is to make the room doesn't feel like it either, which explains the multiple doors within the same room. However, we decided to change it into a graveyard instead of the room because graveyard will always reminds of where their parents is being bury and will get paranoid when thinking or passby that location.
The goal of the level is to demonstrate by walking this path by his own, he can slowly overcome his own fear by facing one of the family member that is dead. Therefore, the level is designed to be linear due to this being the first level of the game and wanted the player to understand the rules and enemy encounters that he/she will faces. Lastly , one of the teddy bear collectable is purposely placed near the start of the game with the wall boundaries to indicate to the player to explore around the place should they meet intersection of the road while one is place on the other intersections of the road to encourage player to go look for it. The puzzle encounters are also designed to further represent the past memories the protagonist and the boss of the level been through, this is why when the puzzle is solve and obtain the remnant ( teddy bear), the player got buff for battle encounters especially for boss encounters.
Project Timeline Contribution
Project Timline Thought Process: When setting up the schedule for each members, I first based around on what's the primary features that have to be completed for the vertical slice build where the lecturers will look at our game and give feedback on the core features on how to be improved on. Only then, I would categorized the other good to have or nice to have feature as secondary feature to work on once all the primary feature is done. However, I also take this time to scale down the project if some of our members are feeling burn out or current primary feature is still not completed or need more refinement so that the final beta build looks more polish and experience friendly towards player.
Challenges
1. Merging Narrative into combat design:
Our game is a heavy narrative driven and dialogue heavy game and when the team decided we are going on a combat direction of using words similar to how Persona 5 or Shin Megami Tensei demon's recruitment, it becomes a big challenge for me as I need to ensure the writing is not as repetitive yet not too long for the player to digest the information.
The first few weeks is a big challenge for me as I have to undergo changes from having multiple branches of 4 options leading into multiple branches of possibilties until being cut down into 2 branches of either good/medium choices and bad choices in the middle of the project. However, solving the issue of having multiple branches lead to repetitiveness. Therefore, I came out with more dialogue options for the mob battles but in exchange of the repetitiveness as the level progresses and player will be familarise with the pattern of the battle while ensuring each boss battle is unique and different from the mob battles where I make every boss turns unqiue and different where player feels a sense of progression within the battle and the story at the same time.
Overall, the biggest takeaway from this narrative driven game is that I need to learn to work smart and not hard, and repetitive sometimes is fine as long the other part of the features stand out mare to balance it.
2. How to scale down when project deadline is closed:
The project duration is around 12 weeks and when we are getting close to the deadline, I decided to make the call of scaling down on the project and focus on polishing the features around week 9 due to some of our member were experiencing burnt out and some features were experiencing bugs. It is tough decisions to make as some features that was completed but unable to implement due to deadline being close which cause disagreements on focus on polishing or continue implementing between teammates. However, looking back scaling down is the best choice of decisions as our current build look more polished than we intial think.