Visual and Musical Difference Between a "Sad" and "Happy" World
Mission: To visually and musically represent the character's mental state.
The game's main concept is to achieve reconnection with your inner child. This needs to be
represented in a clear way to show the strong contrast.
Strategy
I organized a brainstorming session with my closest family members to get a lot of ideas for the main mechanics.
Our brainstorming session focused on finding the differences between the outlook a child
has and the adult vision of things.
We went back to our own childhood when a little garden could become a huge Kingdom using our imagination.
Putting this concept together with the gray vision a sad person has of the World, the basic
mechanic became switching between a colorful world and a gray one.
The colorful vision could only be seen when the "inner child" was connected with the adult character.
A child's world would include:
- Energetic music.
- Colorful textures and VFX.
- Nature SFX.
- Magical characters and Kingdom related buildings replacing "real life" abandoned locations.
3D Level Design
Mission: Create a 3D World that could support both visions (adult's & child's)
The game's setting is the main character's grandma's house, with a huge terrain full of mysterious
places, food for any kid's imagination.
Strategy:
Having no prior practical experience designing levels, it was time to use the skills I've
been reading about in level design articles and The Game Design Den's Discord Server.
The main goals for this mission were:
- To be able to show the player the expected road to follow without being too direct.
- To support both kinds of landmarks: child's and adult's.
I added landmarks that had to be visible and somewhat attractive even in the adult's point of view.
I also encouraged the visit to the first landmark via dialogues.
Dialogue Design
Mission: Write dialogues that can deliver the message and also be entertaining.
Dialogue is a key aspect of the game.
Strategy:
Continuing with the "first time trying something" streak, I tried my first dialogue writing with two goals in mind:
- Deliver the message: the importance of being together with your inner child even when (temporally) apart.
- Include some simple jokes or entertaining beats to encourage reading them.
I made sure I included some of my own kind of jokes and some fairly ridiculous situations to lighten up the mood.
It was also important to include both ways of reacting to the somewhat supernatural events happening: acceptance and reticence.
After the Jam was finished, we faced another challenge regarding the localization and realized some of the design decisions could have
considered the eventual translation of the texts in order to make this process easier.
