So, we made a game, but I only just now got to writing a blog post about it.

Play it here if you don’t want it spoiled maybe?

The primary idea was that your life experiences transform your living space to the point where it could tell a lot about you, to the point where you could restore your own memory by interacting with objects around you. Kind of like you don’t fully remember that trip you’ve taken last year, but details spring to mind once you see some photos or souvenirs.

Initially we thought you’d be playing as an old man, trying to remember something. It wasn’t too exciting, so we thought it’d be more interesting if there was some life and death situation going on, even if there was no immediate risk involved. Currently in the game, you only keep two objects “in memory”, but we considered having the robbers beat you up in slow motion, knocking off memories with each strike.

We started with the story. Before we were sold on the idea, the outline was done in Twine. The graph looked something like this:

There had to be plenty dead ends so you couldn’t just get straight to the end, but everything had to interlink and guide towards the ending. The plot had to be changed on the fly in a few instances and not everything went according to plan, so it’s a bit nonsensical, but the main theme of most clues is Africa. We didn’t want dead-ends to be meaningless, however, so there’s a secret ending for those who visit all 7 important nodes.

Moving all the text and transitions into Unity was quite a tedious process, though. Some shitty javascript saved me time and I only had to copy keys rather than full text strings, but all the transitions still had to be assigned manually. In hindsight, instead of using Twine we should’ve just done a quick and dirty editor extension – would’ve saved a few hours spent fiddling with Twine’s scripting and a few more hours moving everything into Unity.

Visually, we wanted forgotten objects to be abstract and unreal. We experimented with vertex shaders, but we couldn’t get anything looking nice, probably due to lack of experience with geometry shaders and Unity in general. Luckily, Keijiro Takahashi came to rescue with this wobbly ball effect, slight modification of which let us use our own meshes as base.

Ultimately, lack of a dedicated 3d artist on the team and general inexperience with Unity led to delays, which in turn meant we only managed to produce the very base. Still, we think it’s interesting, so there’s that.