Hello again, indieDB Community!
We are the Brainless Bunch, a Portuguese game developer team.
Welcome to our second article about the game we are developing, Essence of the Past.
Essence of the Past is a game about a woman going back to her abandoned childhood home, initially with the intent of selling it.
Our game explores the perspective of someone struggling to reconnect with her past and going back in time through memories captured by Polaroids scattered around time and space.
We hope our last article left a good idea of what's to come regarding our game updates because today we are here to once again share with you all what we've been working on! We'll be going over the early development of the art concepts for our game, and taking a look at the game systems we decided to implement for Essence of the Past!
Sketches
As stated in our game description, Essence of the Past is set in a rural Portuguese home, so we decided to organize our game in 3 areas, which happen in the same place but in different times. The 3 levels of the game are all placed in the living room, in 2015, 1985, and 1960!
Focusing on the thumbnails done for the 1985 living room, also known as Mother's Time, we decided to organize the space according to what was a key aspect in each wall of the room and from there create the space based on the memories that took place in them. We ended up with 32 rough sketches, 8 for each of the walls in Mother's Time.
- Clock Wall
The clock represents the "home" space in which the game happens, it's here that the player will alter the time in order to travel to another! This place contains a fireplace, a door into another space not included in this vertical slice, some decorations, and, finally, the wall clock.
Figure 1 - Grayscale sketches of the Clock Wall
- Television Wall
The next wall of the living room is the television room, from which the television is a distinct giveaway of the current time of the living room. This wall contains a television, a rug, some decorative plates, jars, a big cabinet and some pictures. Opposite to this wall is the sofa.
Figure 2 - Grayscale sketches of the Television Wall
- Window Wall
The window wall is the most bare one, having the window as its main feature. Still, this wall includes a cabinet, a central table, a rug, and an armchair. It serves as a way for the player to have an idea of the changes on the outside of the house.
Figure 3 - Grayscale sketches of the Window Wall
- Sofa Wall
Finally, the sofa wall is one of the core memory holders in our game, having memories in all times. This room contains a cupboard for organization, a central table, a door into another space not included in this vertical slice, some decorations, and the main feature, the sofa!
Figure 4 - Grayscale sketches of the Sofa Wall
These 4 walls are the areas included in Mother's Time, being slightly altered in other times to fit the atmosphere linked to them.
Game System
Another of the early key moments of the development of Essence of the Past, was the stucturization of a game system. This includes the definition of the gameplay and its mechanics, including player skills, inputs, and atomic parameters associated with them!
We settled on the idea of our gameplay features being the finding of objects and the identification of the specific time necessary to input on the clocks in order to travel back in time.
- Finding Mechanic
As a hidden object puzzle game, our main mechanic relies on actually finding the elements that are required of the player. For this, we needed both to have the player decide how they would find the objects and focus on the area available.
Table 1 - Puzzle Solving (Finding) game system
- Identification Mechanic
For our game we decided to have puzzles beyond the hidden object aspect of it, making the player identify a systematic pattern in order to travel back in time. This is done through moving the numbers in the clocks present in the rooms, but to obtain the exact solution the player must search for the answer.
Table 2 - Puzzle Solving (Identifying Patterns) game system
These 2 tables form the general image we make of our game's gameplay mechanics!
With this, we end the documentation of the progress done up to this date, but we still have some interesting things to go over next week! We're so happy we get to share the progress of this progress with everyone and we'll be back next week with a peak into the detailed sketches for Essence of the Past!
Thank you for checking out this second article of ours!
See you next week!
Brainless Bunch
