With this project document, we also have a slides presentation where all this information has been collated into a formal setting. This is will be a collaborative piece between me and Marvin (https://moleinthedirt.notion.site/moleinthedirt/home-sweet-home-87f243c561f1465b80efa7827fbac222)
The current working title for our project is Solum.
“You are alone in the world. You were born alone and will probably die alone, and you are okay with that. But you don’t want to believe it, there have to be other people here, you have to try.”
Looking for companions, Abel explores the broken and destroyed world, both learning about himself and the fate of everyone around him. The world is vast and with so much to traverse Abel will need upgrades to access new areas and find a way around the crumbling landscape, but it's no problem for our protagonist. A Metroidvania platformer with a variety of mechanics which change and enhance gameplay to make an immersive game environment. Utilizing pixel art to create a dynamic and breathtaking landscape that remains synonymous with the genre, making it stand out as a game.
Our research consisted of looking into the long-term and psychological effects of loneliness on a person's both physical and mental health. This was about learning about why loneliness affects us so drastically and affects our way of communicating with the world. We wanted our game to be an experience that reflected on an important aspect of social connections and how we connect with the world around us. Especially with online culture becoming more prominent and more digital friendships becoming people's only means of connections, we wanted to explore what we would be in the absence of real connections, and relationships with people. We found that while isolated, people fall into a vicious cycle, their loneliness leads to depression and a lack of self-worth that in turn makes it harder and harder for them to overcome their loneliness. People who become chronically lonely have a higher chance of having physical illness too, with weaker immune systems and weaker hearts, linking into a broken heart syndrome and dying alone. But what we wanted to explore was whether loneliness is learned or inherent to being human; What if you never met another person? What if you had never felt a connection with another person? Would you be able to feel lonely? In terms of in our society there a very few cases of people growing up without some form of connections, wild children brought up by animals still develop connections, and the culture of those animals and sadly those brought up in abusive households still experience a form of human contact even if it's cruel. We were worried about both misrepresenting this type of mistreatment within the game and also we realized the impact this would have on the development of our character, so after a very long time of brainstorming, we decided to make our character an android that doesn't know they are a robot. This was so we could explore complete loneliness without having to explain away the developmental problems this would cause the character growing up, moreover to separate out our theme on human relation to loneliness, exploring whether an android would be able to experience loneliness and having them navigate these feelings would be both an interesting concept and would be a great storytelling device for our game, having a character arc that the player can follow.
The goal of this project is to create an experience that truly gets across the feelings of loneliness and isolation. Wanting to help others empathize with those who are truly alone and help people recognize those feelings both in themselves and others. We personally want to create a game that both highlights our skills sets and separates us apart from others but also really showcases our talents and passions in games. I want the people that play our game to know what a good Metroidvania is like and enjoy playing it.
From a professional angle, we want our project to be accessible to a broad audience and reach all users that would want to play our game; we have made efforts to make all aspects of our design and process approachable for both new and experienced players so that they can pick up and play our game without much hassle and really get a feeling for what we were trying to achieve within the game. If by the end of our user's experience they had fun and were invested in playing our game we have achieved our goal with the game.
We are hoping to make our game appeal to a broad audience, in order to make our game successful in the industry. So our target audience is teens to young adults- the biggest demographic in games. This specific audience has an avid interest in platforming indie games, such as 'Hollow Knight', 'Celeste', and 'Jump King'. While a few years ago this would have been a smaller target audience, recently (especially within the last few years) these games have become critically known and are well-favored among the mainstream audience, this is highlighted by the anticipation with the sequel to 'Hollow Knight', 'Silk Song', coming out soon and the huge interest in 'Jump King'. In the past, this would have never happened, but now, with the design and style of 'Jump King', it is playing into a niche that is becoming more popular and mainstream, and thus, we believe it is one of the best genres and audiences for our game to be in.
We are intending to be releasing this game on pc as this has the biggest users base and this also allows us to branch out what distribution platform we can use for our game such as Steam, itch.io, and Humble store. There is a range of different steps and requirements we need to go through in order to get our games on these different platforms, such as the steam direct program which replaced greenlight in 2017, which means you have to go through a selection and voting process.
Why is our game going to be better than everyone else?
We truly believe that we have one of the strongest teams this year. We have worked on projects previously together and are great at communicating with one another. We both contribute a range of different specializations that the other lacks so we are able to cover all bases of our game and make sure to ensure a high quality of work for our project. For the project, Marvin will be handling the programming, assets, and backgrounds while Lio will be doing the narrative, character art, and concepts, having both of us working on music, level design, and promotion. The two of us share the same interest and passions so there are rarely any conflicts in the creative direction of our project, and while we both have different workflows; we communicate well where we need more time or help with an aspect of our work. In comparison to other teams, we have fewer people in our team, which will mean there will be more work for both of us to handle and it means we will need to dedicate far more our of time and energy to the project. However, we believe this is a benefit to our team because it means we are more dedicated to our work and have more investment in the success of our game. Less time is spent allocating work and managing work drama when it' 's very clear who is doing what and that we are both very flexible with our work and the aim of our project.