In my previous blog I talked about being brought on to the project “Vacuum Vault” and outlined several goals that I wished to achieve. Since then the project has gone through two sprints and several things have changed. In this blog I would like to review some of these changes to the project and explain my role on it.
Possibly the biggest change to the project was the complete change of level design and art. It was decided that the older level and most of its assets would be scrapped. This was done because the original level was not up to the standard that we wanted. In addition this was done as many of the old assets no longer fit with the snowy environment we were now aiming to create. The other major change was the change to the game’s name. This has switched from “Vacuum Vault” to “Eira: Echoes of Egil”. This decision was made for marketing reasons as we were concerned that the previous name was too generic.
My part on the project so far has primarily been to construct a narrative for the game. Previously the game had no set narrative and only a very lose context. Working with the product owner and other designers I began constructing a narrative for the game. This included creating the primary characters, building the world and writing the main story arc.
This project posed several challenges for creating an engaging narrative. The first challenge has been our audience. We are trying to target young children under the age of ten. As such we cannot complicate too much or we risk our audience not understanding it. In addition we have a very limited amount of art that can be used to tell exposition. While our main narrative will be told in engine but images and text will be used to tell the player the explosion and epilogue. This decision was made as those are the only two areas that do not take place in the same area as gameplay. However because of the massive amount of assets that need to be created there is very few resources that can be allocated to creating these images. As such when planning these sections of the narrative I can only ask for 3 total images to be created.
To solve these problems I created a simple narrative but a more complicated world that the player could optionally explore. This will provide a simple narrative for our young audience while having a more complex world that can be explored by an older audience. In addition this will allow the narrative to be told with limited art. The simple core narrative dose not need many images to tell and the rest can be told via in game text prompts.
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