Hey there! I want to talk to you about the way we designed the narrative and the texts in Take Care of Her. If you haven’t played it, you can click here to play it!

So I won’t go spoiler-heavy, but will merely tell you how we designed the narrative sequence of the game, and how we tried to work on certain aspects of the game to make the reader or player feel moved and engaged in our game.

My main inspiration for this work was as much from books as from games. First, the French writer Annie Ernaux, that you may know for her autobiographic work about her life and her will to write. She creates room in her text thus the reader can easily project themselves in these holes, filling it with their experience and point of view. From games, I mainly got the inspiration from narrative-heavy games such as Firewatch, which frames characters and events by very little amount of text!

What we really tried with Take Care of Her was to create a character, Daniel, who had a unique life, yet you could easily identify with him on many levels. We wanted the player to feel like each fragment of memory was a part of Daniel’s life, but could also be a part of their own life. Here are several ways we used for this :

• Most of the memories about Daniel depicts a peculiar moment of his life, but most of us already lived what he lived (last day of school, looking at stars with friends, attending a wedding…), thus we can easily relate to the event with our own experience and the symbolic meaning we gave it.

• Text is written with an emphasis on senses and how Daniel “feels” the world: it mentions several colors, several smells and feelings, like being in a crowd or smelling sweating bodies in a party. Also, there are a lot of mentions about the body and its condition: being hot (and you are probably quite hot because of this bloody summer :D), being in bad health state, being sweaty and moist. What we want is for the reader to “feel” the text. If it works, they can more easily connect with it and the sensations that are expressed.

Thus, each choice that the game offers to the player are getting harder and harder. In the end there is only one choice : am I building Daniel, or am I wishing I could live again these memories I have and erase some of them ?

Thanks you for reading this! And, please, Take Care of Her

• Lucas

Hi I’m Lucas! This is the third and last entrance to the Dev log of our game, Take Care of Her. If you want to play our game, just click on this link This dev log is going to stay Spoiler FREE, don’t worry!

For Take Care of Her, I used LogicPro 9 on Mac to record my acoustic guitar, also used the built-in amps and synth that you can use on LogicPro. I'll dive about my way of writing the songs.

Each song was about 30 seconds / 1-minute length, except the end of the game. We didn’t want the music to loop because we felt it would be boring for people since it’s a textual game. Sometimes reading can get annoying if you are trying to focus on the music at the same time. Which is why we decided to use a little bit of music for each memory (= screen), as a way to introduce the mood. It was definitely a moody game, yeah. I’ll just go about three ways of thinking music that I used to compose them.

1 – Diegetic music ###

• A sound is diegetic whether it’s part of the action. If you are looking at a movie, you hear a phone rings, and the character in the movie picks up the phone, then the sound is diegetic because it’s directly in the action.

In Take care of Her, I tried to reproduce this process with some songs I wrote. First memory, “Sacrifice”, tells the reader that Eva is playing the guitar, lazily lying in the grass. Thus, I wrote a guitar part that would feel nonchalant and also very smooth. It’s the end of the year, your friend is pinching some strings on their guitar: you know exactly what’s the tone of what he’s playing. Nostalgic and chill.

This is the same in “Intimity”, where the characters are listening to a music with piano, drums, and guitar in the text. This is a “fake diegetic music”, because I composed something with these three instruments. The player can then hear what the characters are listening to, but not hear what’s happening in the woods where they are taking a walk.

2 – Moody music

• Moody music doesn’t exist, don’t use this in anything you’d say :D I just feel like this is the correct word for what I tried to do ; also this is what you’ll often encounter in most of today’s games’ OST. Moody musics are songs that try to create an emotional connection between what’s happening and what you are listening to. They try to depict an emotion, a feeling for what is going on in a particular scene and try to convey this feeling with instruments.

I wrote some songs with this process in mind in Take Care of Her. This can be the case for “Shooting Stars”, “Different” or “Moving In”. All three songs use some instruments or rhythms that try to convey emotions. In "Shooting Stars", I’m using a very “crystal” sound that I felt like as pure as the shooting stars dashing in the sky. "Different" use a combination of distorted drums and a very light guitar to represent the loneliness of the character trying to escape from the high drums (ie the city). "Moving In", last, use a fast rhythm and the classic pentatonic / blues scale to create a jumpy song. I moved out recently, and oh boy, you need to have a fast rhythm :D !

3 – Symbolism music

• Symbolism music also doesn’t exist – but you get the idea. This last part is especially about the idea behind the songs you can hear at the end of the game. Each memory is then represented with a single chord played for 10 seconds.

The idea behind this process is to associate a chord for each character that is mentioned. *It’s like in *Peter and the wolf, an old fairy tale for children, **where each character is associated to an orchestra instrument.

In the last part of our game, the player is presented with screens with very little text, but strong meaning, since it’s a choice game: you keep a memory but choose to erase one for it. Each screen comes with a chord (“Eva”, ”Dad”, ”Rose”, ”Mother”), all part of a 4 chords progression I wrote for a song. Thus, each character is portrayed by a mood and a chord, part of the same “song” , thus the same life, Daniel’s life. The very last song keeps playing and keeps spinning between your right and left ear, as to say that you can’t really escape it – your choices, nor their consequences.

Thanks you for reading this very long bit of text, I hope you had some fun (and learned some stuff!) Please give me some feedbacks, and, please, Take Care of Her