Gallery
Blue Moon
Project Summary
A story of people being in a tough time, regaining what belongs to them. The story progresses through a collection of mini-games, simulation elements, and a dynamic dialogue system in a 2D top-down perspective. The game targets young learners who love to explore stories through interactive gameplay on a computer.
Team
- Ahmed Adel Attaalla Salem – Programmer
- Dustin Richard Terry – Programmer
- Rakibul Hasan Toor – Game design
- Ruben Alexandar Menzel – Artist
Production Year
2018
Genre
Narrative Game
Project Type
Semester Project (2nd)
Platforms
PC
My Contributions
Challenges and Learnings
This is a part of our 2nd Semester Narrative Game Project on the topic “Why don’t you play by the games?”
The topic was interpreted as “why don’t you play by the rules?” As a narrative game, we wanted to represent a story of struggle and fighting against the propaganda machine in a difficult time. The game narrative was designed to make the players aware of the struggle and save themselves from propaganda machine through narrative arcs and minigames.
The game tells a historical story from a different perspective, which is rarely explored. As a result, a research on the historical events was researched and analyzed on the experience. Thus the game adapted the historical events in a fictional narrative focusing on the emotion and experience rather than the events themselves.
The main challenge on the designing the game was to keep the player motivated through the narrative, as the game focused on inducing ethical questions and emotions, while creating awareness. Rather than focusing on fun, gameplay mechanics were designed to engage player through minigames and narrative choices. In general, disobeying or experimenting with game is a fun activity, while in this game it seems boring and losing until the final climax. As a result, the game required special attention to design its mechanics to keep the player motivation to play through.
The narrative and game world was designed based on historical events without making the player realized. The story progression follows the three-act structure based on real events. While the story progression is handcrafted, the game allows player to make different decisions and achieving different results. This increases replayability, even in a strict narrative structure. Additionally, the game characters were designed in such a way that the player may be able to connect in emotional level.
As the game doesn’t reward the player like other games, the economy for minigames and other parameters needed to be dynamic. So a dynamic difficulty system is designed so that it can adjust based on players performance and keeps the player in flow. Thus, the design of “Tavern Management” minigame had a very complex system, which is explained in the attached Design Document.
I had contributed to plan for project management and provided a tentative project planning. Additionally, I had also documented the whole process and created the trailer for the game with the help of our artist. My previous experience in videography allowed me to create a stunning trailer for pitching.