PROJECT OVERVIEW
Year: 2021
Role: Game Designer/Writer/Artist
Collaborator: Elizaveta Khilkovskaya
Medium: Visual Novel
Engine: Unity
A visual novel about two lovers, separated by death, who finally meet in a weird limbo. It begins as an unassuming love story, but soon something sinister brews - and you start questioning the situation you're in.
The project I've created and developed in less than 3 weeks. I collaborated with a character artist, Elizaveta, and developed the story, worked on choices, and implemented everything into the Unity engine, using Fungus as the Dialogue System. Additionally, I drew background art and finale art.
GAME & WRITING DECISIONS
The task of making a visual novel in three weeks meant that I didn't have many resources to show everything I wanted - there were sacrifices and compromises for the sake of artistic vision. For example, I chose to write only dialogues, to enhance the feeling of connection between the two characters. That also meant incorporating symbolics into the visual design - plants, water, phones.
Water is flowing into this limbo space, counting time, since the main character is drowning in their bathtub at the same moment. Plants - in some sense, an arbitrary reason for the main character to survive - who's gonna care for them if not him, a connection to the real world. It doesn't really matter - most of them are dead. It seems like a weak reasoning and to some extent, that's my intention - I want the player to doubt Charlie's stance in this story. Phones are detrimental to the story since it's a way for the main character to reason with himself and decide his fate. He gets calls from his friends, half-dreamy, a mirror of his relationships with them. Hearing their voices affects him and the player's decision on the matter.
Dialogue-wise, I wanted to create a snappy dynamic that mirrors what these characters used to be for each other - the closest person. They flow through this conversation, nostalgic and grieving their time together, sharing light memories.
ART DIRECTION
I developed a color palette for the game early on, following the existing character guidelines - black, orange, and green. This quickly gave my collaborator a good idea of the scope and coloring style. I was going for something simple due to a short development cycle, but also attractive and minimalistic. First I developed a layout and built UI based on that. I was looking for a snappy, flat color dynamic between two characters, having their boxes bounce off of each other so it's clear who's speaking with no additional indicators. Knowing that their main colors are complimentary to each other, I wanted to create a sense of space and emptiness around them - blueish great done that job well, in my opinion. Thus, I came to a clear color palette with good contrast that transferred the feeling of this limbo in limited detail.
Working with Elizaveta on the character art started based on the existing dialogue. We determined needed character emotions for both characters and Elizaveta started working on them. We wanted to highlight that Frankie's character (orange), is in a ghostly state, so we decided to let him float in different poses throughout the whole story, another tool we chose to make the player question their experience.
DIEGETIC SOUND
I chose to use diegetic sounds since I tried to focus the writing strongly on the dialogue aspect, so I felt the need to describe the situation around the main character with another kind of information channel. Everything that the player here is either a part of their environment or an indicator of dialogue choices affecting something. Water sounds follow the player's experience and frame it - when the water flow heavies, Charlie's time is running out. Phone rings also accompany their journey and characters react to it.
