Industry Practice - Brief, Studio Roles + Reviewing Benchmark Games (04/10/24)

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In this session, we were introduced to our teams. My team consists of Me, Jake, Katie, Sam and Faye. We used this lesson to discuss the brief in more detail, assign our roles and discuss the direction of this project. We named our team Mask Studios.

The roles each of us were assigned are;

Director - Sam

Lead Story/ Dialogue - Katie

Lead Character Artist - Jake

Lead UI/ Environment Artist - Me

Research - Faye


Collaborative Sharing

We discussed the research we did last lesson and went over what we loved and hated in interactive fiction.

What we liked:

  • Multiple sprites for one character for different emotions.
  • Horror, creature
  • Splash arts at the end
  • Different endings
  • Option to choose choices

What we disliked:

  • Abrupt endings/ text only endings
  • Characters that look to similar
  • Stories that were too rushed or took to long to get interesting

We created a Discord and a Miro board to help us keep in contact and to share our research.


Game Content and Narrative

We discussed a lot of different ideas but the main one that grasped our interest was the idea of having these monster or creatures manifesting different mental struggles. This led to us thinking more about these monsters being big at the start or when the character is struggling but they would slowly disappear. We ended up changing this idea though but still kept the idea of having this monster.

The main idea

We had this idea of the characters not being tormenting by monsters but are the monsters themselves. These monsters wear mask to hide their faces and the more you help them, the more like themselves they become until eventually they are able to take the mask off. Our idea was to have the character play the role of a therapist where they listen to each characters struggles and at the end each character would be there together in the support group where ,depending on the players choices, they'll decide to keep or remove their mask.

We had a lot of ideas of how we wanted our game to look like and what we wanted to include;

  • Bad Ending - Everyone leaves the support group?
  • Have a prompt that shows when the player pick the wrong option "[Name] didn't like that"
  • Flashbacks/ memories consist of black/ white/ grey colours
  • Each character has their own colour that represents them and this colour becomes more apparent as the characters become more themselves
  • Perhaps research colour meanings and have them relate to the persons struggles
  • Meaningful names
  • Maybe at the start they refer to themselves as their mask (e.g. Plague doctor) and at the end they choose to give out their real names.

We each Recommended some games that fit the vibe/ aesthetic we were going for;
  • Little Nightmares (Tarsier Studios, 2017)
  • Keep In Mind (Little Moth Games, 2018)
  • Fran Bow (Killmonday Games, 2015)
Below is some art of the monster designs in Keep in Mind that we referenced during our discussion.


https://www.deviantart.com/mimi-nekochina/art/Keep-in-Mind-Game-Monsters-627402600


Reference List

Killmonday Games, 2015. Fran Bow [online]. PC. Sweden: Killmonday Games. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/362680/Fran_Bow/ [Accessed 4 October 2024].


Little Moth Games, 2018. Keep In Mind: Remastered [online]. PC. California: Akupara Games. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/643200/Keep_in_Mind_Remastered/ [Accessed 4 October 2024].


Mini - NekoChina, 2016. Keep in Mind - Game - 'Monsters' [Digital]. DeviantArt Available at: https://www.deviantart.com/mimi-nekochina/art/Keep-in-Mind-Game-Monsters-627402600 [Accessed 4 October 2024].


Tarsier Studios, 2017. Little Nightmares [online]. PC. Tokyo: Bandai Namco Entertainment. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/424840/Little_Nightmares/ [Accessed 4 October 2024].





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