We wanted to create an experience that didn’t involve traveling through the wilderness. And although we were inspired by Firewatch, we wanted to build an environment that was familiar, yet disconnected. The story follows an ordinary office worker named Greg. While working in his cubicle, thinking about the last conversation with his wife, Margaret, he gets caught in an explosion. After this, the player is sent into a dreamscape, in which they escape from with the encouraging voices of his lover. Greg wakes up from the coma, representing by the exiting of the dreamscape, seeing Margaret the hospital bed he awoke in. Our team comprised of Analisse, Fu and Michelle. In respective order, mainly doing asset modeling, audio, and mapping along with the narrative. And of course, we all dabbled in code, helping each other out occasionally.

We had planned a lot for this game, which led the eventual “killing your baby”, as we couldn’t make create that idea with the allotted time. Still, we had plenty of successes. For starters, the game was a good review for all us and a great way to learn new ways to code, which Michelle in particular, is very proud of as she worked on the lights in the maze. Secondly, we really got our narrative through, something we were striving to achieve, especially with Margaret being the one leading the player throughout the maze. Thirdly, Analisse brought the office to life with her assets from Maya and, I quote, “was a really good refresher ‘cos I forgot everything.” Fourthly, Fu gained experience editing audio clips on Adobe Audition, which surprisingly required lots of editing despite being short clips, but that’s what made it all the more important. And Lastly, Michelle was able to find fitting ambiance and music for the game.

One thing we had struggled with was showing the narrative of our game. We solved this with the adding of Margret’s voices in the red section of the maze to lead the player through it and the narrative text at the end and beginning, but, as we talked about it after our presentation, the meaning for the game and reason for it was still kind of left undone. Even after the ending where the player would fall off the map was something that was left alone without any thought.

Another challenge we encountered was actually having everyone working on the project. Michelle tried her best to lead the group, wanting to have everyone input on some matters but learned that in some cases it’s better to just push through with your ideas. We had a discord set up where I’d post messages of what needed to be done, things we should probably take away since there was insufficient time to finish, which is why a lot of the ideas were thrown away, but we still did our best to show our narrative through text, which would have been much better being voiced aloud. Even though we also added Margret’s voices for clarity, it would have been good if there were more of a smooth entry from the beginning so the player could recognize more clearly that Greg and Margret were two characters. This must be why giving voices to your characters is important.

Initially, from brainstorming, we wanted to create an office environment and a broken down building for the maze section. This was one of the goals that we didn’t achieve and left the map with a lackluster appearance. We did like leaving the office section blank because it left an eerie atmosphere, but as for the rest of the sections, there could have obviously been more texturing and modeling so the spaces weren’t so rectangular, but following more of a wonky line down a dreamscape.

On one of the office desks, the one that was more humanized than the others, there is a picture of a family. We hoped to have signified some sort of idea that that desk was the character the player was playing as. However, we don’t believe to have accomplished that and should have something that would have triggered like a memory perhaps or Margret’s voice and the laughter of their children to connect the player to that other character.

We had larger plans for the office environment actually and the whole layout of the map Instead of making it a single square place, we had wanted to make it a building where the player would travel through, guided by the ceiling lights. The only shared aspect from that first concept is the immaculate white walls and floor. They would then travel into a darker, destruction-filled environment with signs of the aftermath of an explosion. The space wasn’t supposed to be fully red like what we had in the final game, but the red within it was to be red in order to suggest danger or an emergency. After the player escaped, they would walk out of this building and see it from the outside and discover they were in a void the whole time and soon light would overtake them, leading them back to the real world. This was something we kept with the added falling down the space. It may have worked better if we had a model wake up in shock back in the real world to still have that connection from the dreamscape.

One of our biggest takeaways from this project is to stop thinking so big before we even have the basis of our game set up. Even then, it would be good to have each person focus on a big chunk of what we planned since a lot of that was all over the place, which led to a lot of our concept to be left in the dust. Another takeaway is to think more about the reason for the game when creating a narrative instead of just thinking it because it’s something common. This was one of the downfalls of our game, leaving the narrative flat.