F0rgott3n
Genre: nonlinear-narrative, 2D-sidescroller
Team Size: 6
Duration: 2 months
F0rgott3n is a story driven 2D game about dementia, guilt and redemption.
Dive into the fading memories of Alma, an old woman plagued by guilt. Explore her memories through sounds and reconstruct them. Visit places from her past and relive her memories. But are you able to uncover the harsh truth and repair her past mistakes before it is too late?
Genre: nonlinear-narrative, 2D-sidescroller
Team Size: 6
Duration: 2 months
F0rgott3n is a story driven 2D game about dementia, guilt and redemption.
Dive into the fading memories of Alma, an old woman plagued by guilt. Explore her memories through sounds and reconstruct them. Visit places from her past and relive her memories. But are you able to uncover the harsh truth and repair her past mistakes before it is too late?
My responsibilties
- Developing narrative and connected gameplay system in collaboration with other designer
- Iterating on mechanics and interactions supporting the emotional theme
- Outlining the nonlinear way how the story gets revealed to the player in collaboration with other designer
- Communication and collaboration with writer and giving feedback
- Assembling most of the scenes and story beats in engine
- Tweaking various elements in engine
- Creating story events in engine using custom tool
- Communication with programmer
- Programming smaller story-specific interactions
- Creating animation tree in collaboration with character artist
- Creating custom editor tool to insert story events in engine
- Project Planning, mapping out dependencies
- Prioritizing task
- Prepare team meetings (agendas)
- Solving problems between team members
My responsibilties
- Developing narrative and connected gameplay system in collaboration with other designer
- Iterating on mechanics and interactions supporting the emotional theme
- Outlining the nonlinear way how the story gets revealed to the player in collaboration with other designer
- Communication and collaboration with writer and giving feedback
- Assembling most of the scenes and story beats in engine
- Tweaking various elements in engine
- Creating story events in engine using custom tool
- Communication with programmer
- Programming smaller story-specific interactions
- Creating animation tree in collaboration with character artist
- Creating custom editor tool to insert story events in engine
- Project Planning, mapping out dependencies
- Prioritizing task
- Prepare team meetings (agendas)
- Solving problems between team members
Story
Traumatised by domnestic violence in her marriage ending in rape, Alma abandons her newborn child in a forest.
Nonlinear experience & gameplay
Players can use repulsion…
- to boost each other over gaps which are too far away for a normal jump
- to perform higher jumps
- to accelerate when seperating
Players can use attraction…
- to drag the other player up, e.g. out of a hole
- to pull a jumping player to the next platform
- to accelerate when together
- to make one player walk at the ceilling
Tweaking & faking physics
The main goal was to create an impactful, thus strong, charge effect on the one hand. On the other hand, it should not feel annoying to move together, being constantly influenced by each other.
These two seemingly conflicting goals required a lot of iterations, testing and as well as faking the real life physics.
The player’s gravity, mass, max Speed values and animation curves of attraction and repulsion needed all to be harmonised. Since the effect of the magnetic force depends on the distance between both players and their current movement, the process got very complicated.
Puzzle and action elements
To create more variety in gameplay challenges, the charge mechanics is used with regard to objects to create puzzle and action challenges, such as charged platforms or elevators (movable by attraction and repulsion) or dangerous charged antimatter, which the player needs to dodge (and reacts dependent of the player’s charge).