Finally I came up with and updated game scheme and is certain about the connections between scenes and locations.
First of all the game consists of 5 locations, each of them has corresponding symol, mini game and cut-scene attached to it. The game plays with the direction the cat is moving towards in the game. The idea is that at the very beginning we don’t know, where the cat is heading to. On default we assume that he’s going somewhere from starting point to his goal. But as the game proceeds and we see more and more cut-scenes, we realize that locations that we see there are going in reverse order in the game. Which means that the cat is actually not moving forward, but going back.
I’m trying to do a bit of environmental storytelling here as in cut-scenes the locations look more happy and lively (because the cat feels happy in anticipation of a long awaited meeting), while in the game they look more abandoned and lonely to share the disappointed feelings. Especially it will be seen in the camp location as an example.
Arrows in the upper part show my struggles to choose the order of locations. At some point I got lost in them, so that even now I can’t already describe precisely what I was thinking about at the moment and why they ended up in such an order. But this wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was to mix and distribute games and cut-scenes along the game. As you can see on the upper scheme, cut-scenes should tell the actual (back)story – the things that happened before the game started and contains character’s motives together with the correct order of locations.
The tricky part was that locations in cut-scenes must appear before the character actually reaches them. Otherwise the player won’t get the “reverse order and going back” thing. So at least one cut-scene needs to be played ahead of the first mini game. Because I initially thought that cut-scenes will be something like a reward for winning and should be related to the actions (or theme) in mini game. In the first part of the game you can see that the first cut-scene (marked in clowdy bubble) will just spawn on trigger without any additional interation. It was needed just to break this initial order and thematic connection between cut-scene and corresponding mini game.
But by doing that I ran into another problem: the reason of mini games being there. I unerstand that initially the games are there just to include some intercation into the story. And with breaking connection between game and cut-scene I have lost the reason of mini games to be present. Untill I came up with the solution that has put all the puzzle pieces together. Instead of connecting them to cut-scenes, I’ll connect them to locations. Since the whole intention of the game is to make the player care for the cat, I’ll adjust the games, so that as the result of playing them, you help the cat to move to another location. For example, in the train location cat spots an open carriage where he stays for some time to rest and sleep. The player in the meantime must scare away bad dreams (bats) to let him rest somehow.
Since I already know the climax scene, I want to create a little plot twist by creating custom cursor in the shape of the sparkle in the ending to hint on that all this time it was us – cat’s friend, who guided and helped him all along the trip.
So having decided all that, I’m fully entering the development step and now it’s more about technical implementation. Some changes are possible, of course, in case I don’t manage to implement something physically.