Still…
Still... is an interpretive game experience about getting through the struggle of daily living, where players move through different rooms and tasks to reach different checkpoints of their unproductive day. This project aims to illustrate how mental illnesses can hinder someone's progress or ability to push through each day for even the simplest of tasks.
Our team, comprised of Ellie Clendenning (Programming), Cassie Hui (Visuals, Narrative, and Project Management), Munro Provine (Audio and Level Design), and me (UIUX & Asset Design) worked to blend a bullet hell game with a narrative-based experience. I personally worked as a UI/UX designer and implementor, working on character/asset design, and implementing the appropriate programming for movement, health systems, and text effects.
Beginning from a base of a transforming room dodging game, we toned down the pacing and incorporated new visuals, narrative, and audio elements. The bed, pills, headphones, mirror, and other common room objects were created to be shared objects that can reflect aspects in the player’s personal lives.
Gameplay
Still... is an interpretive experience, where players use the Arrow Keys to dodge and navigate through each level to reach the blue goal, which after being stood on, will transform the room into the next stage. By the end, players should get the sense that the gameplay centers on the struggle of making it through each day of life. The game ends with a new day beginning and the day is reset, suggesting that life simply continues on with the same drolls as yesterday.
Character
I had created a simple, spinning hexagon with a melancholy look in its center. This design was to mimic games like geometry dash while adding a more unsettling face in its center to create an empty feeling character that can act as a player self-insert. Movement was programmed to feel smooth and the character's face animates and blinks slowly, cycling between frames. Below are the assets I created to populate each room, with a hand-drawn chalk-like aesthetic.
Player Feedback
The character is designed to only display its health via a fading opacity in its sprite and some vfx. By removing a health bar, the character allows for subtle player feedback and makes this game appear with more minimalist AI, allowing for a greater focus on the narrative with visual/noise queues to signify when the player is getting hurt.
User Interface
Text effects were scripted to give the user interface its shakiness, using a coroutine to write it out character by character with warping. As such, this paired well with the visuals and narrative, as an extra visual style to make the game feel more emotionally effective in the way it displays text.
Playtests
This game was one that specifically benefited even more from playtesting, since we used a questionnaire to gather feedback, we were able to gauge the difficulty of the game and also see how clear and open-ended our narrative experience was felt by players. These ultimately help us make better improvements and adjustments to the narrative interpretation and design of the project.
