I’ve breen struggling these days with bringing all the ideas and thoughts about the game to some kind of an order. Actually I wasn’t sure about where to start with developing my story. So I started with simple questions which came to my mind, while I was looking at the image, that the player will see for most of the game:
By this point I have already dropped the idea of path choices, because it would be too much work for this project. I still must remain realistic about the deadlines and my work capacity, taking into account we have one more project going and me still having another part-time course. So the game will be very linear with one thing being determined by the other.
After asking myself these questions, I managed to figure out what is the bare minumum of information I have to include in order to produce a complete story. They are “Where is he going?” aka the game goal, and “How did he end up here?” aka the backstory.
Ok, now I need to decide, how to present these parts of story coherently. Almost immediately I thought about cut-scenes, which are a nice way to set a parallel story without messing up the actual gameplay story. So that current events are happenig as the game flows, while bits of backstory are shown in flashbacks.
But at this point I have a problem going on, which is such approach will turn my game into animation actually made in Unity even though player will be able to control the character in one way or another. A very boring walking simulator. So, to include some interaction I’m thinking about incorporating mini games, that will happen, for example, after the character finds a symbolic item. A game will be played and after that a piece of backstory is revealed.
With these thoughts in mind I created the Plan, which helped me get some structure of my future work:
So now we can see that the game is separated into 3 parts depending on the character state. In the beginning the cat is still full of power and is running on his own without player being able to control him. Since it would be boring to just watch the cat running, this part should be relatively short with just, maybe, one mini game. The main part is where the player gets control over the cat with keyboard buttons and has to walk around to find mini games and trigger flashbacks. At this stage the cat is pretty much tired, but still can walk. The further he gets the slower he becomes. Eventually he collapses and final part happens, where the player has to drag the character, making him get to his final destination. I hope that this feature will be able to communicate the filling that only player’s help can bring the cat to his goal.
But with that being said, I still couldn’t see the whole story. Only some parts of it like the final mimigame and cut-scene, following it, which will be the climax of the whole story, that reveals why the cat took this trip, what happened just before the strat of the game, when we see him alone in snow desert, and where is he actually going. That will connect story with the backstory.
By that time I was already uncomfortable that I still have nothing done physically about the game, so even without having all parts of the story thought through, I started working on the parts I was sure enough about. I understand that it’s not the best way to do, because it can end up with these pieces being reworked or cut out eventually. But at least I can set up at least a small piece of prototype and create some assets.
As a warm-up I started with the music mini game, where you have to recreate the melody the cat sings. And I couldn’t think that such a simple task would require me much more time than I expected. About 2 days actually. I did the drag&drop mechanics before, but I ran into the problem of spawning notes in a particular order while clicking the same button. This is where I had to learn about lists and resourses folder. Fortunately, with the help of Zhan, fellow students and a couple of youtube tutorials, I solved the issue and the first mini game was ready.
Music is symbolic, because my friend is a musician, so it’s one of the first things to come to my mind. The notes are also special which are first 4 notes of Lensky arioso from Eugene Onegin opera, which contain phrase “I love you”. Actually this refers to a post, spotted in russian social media from time to time about the strength of education in tzar Russia. The post tells about a girl, who saw these 4 notes in a lock charm of her granddad. When he asked her to guess, what’s encrypted in these notes, she quickly sang them and recognized the arioso and the words “I love you”.
I thought that this would be a clever reference, but quite soon realized that barely anyone will be able to understand the reference, so I eventually changed the song to the current main theme. But the original notes still left and my friend even recorded sounds for them.
Apart from that I made some preparatory work at this stage that is background elements, cat run and walk animations and controls, which I will need later.