PROJECT OVERVIEW
Year: 2021
Role: Game Designer/Narrative Consultant
Collaborators: Valya Severin, Stas Galkin
Medium: 2D adventure
Engine: Unity
2D narrative adventure game about the warmth of fleeting childhood memories: about a little boy named Sanya, his dog, his friends, and many exciting adventures that await them in a small post-soviet Russian town set in the achingly strange and nostalgic period of the 90s.
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
During my time on the project in 2021, I worked as a technical designer, as well as did some refinements in narrative design. This project was my first collaborative experience where I learnt to follow existing project's guidelines and creative goals. Valya and Stat gave me a comprehensive idea of the project's pronouncements and aimed objectives: provoking feeling of nostalgia in players who lived through the era, while representing our common culture to foreigners. I feel like these themes are extremely important to me as a creator from marginalized North Asian ethnicity. To me, representing this experience fairly and honestly is crucial, and working through Sanya's script proved me to believe that creator's hearts are where mine is. Working with them, proved my ability to quickly resonate with project's needs, while adopting proprietary tools. Additionally, I collaborated on the pitch deck studio was developing at the moment and managed all communication between publishers and the developing team.
TECHNICAL DESIGN
My main prerogative during development was, first: understanding the existing architecture of the project, and second: developing planned features. For example, I developed the bicycle mini-game, where Sanya gets to race against his peers. I can't show the gameplay of that right now, since the project is still in development. Stas Galkin, lead programmer, have developed a node system and event system for the project to enhance the development and make creating and implementing new content easier. It's also used as a dialogue system and improved our experience of developing levels and sequences. While that was available, mini-games needed a robust scripting, which is exactly what was needed of me. I developed, play-tested and implemented bicycle mini-game, following documentation created for me by Valya and improving through feedback I got from the team.
part of code I wrote - braking for the bike
NARRATIVE REFINEMENT
Working through the existing script at the time, I was asked to proof-read it's translation and edit existing dialogues, especially, fill it with both nostalgic bits and pieces - so that people who grew in the nineties in the Soviet Union could relate to them, and add some well adjusted educational dialogues that could give others an idea about these times and what struggles people had to face.
