💎 Pitch
Hey you.. Please help my father, he seems.. Lost in his thoughs.. He's really sick you know
Lend him a hand for us, his lovely family
🌟 Introduction
AlzMemory? is a short narrative game that immerses players in the fragmented mind of a father battling Alzheimer's. Through intimate vignettes, the game explores his struggles with fading memories and the emotional weight of past regrets, as his children, grandmother, and subconscious bring buried feelings to the surface.
This is a short project we created for the Haut-de-Seine Festival, we had to make a game around the theme Courage.
My objectives during this project was to try orienting and making the players feel and think through a created character with his own story and background. For this particular story and narrative context we tried doing something around ALzheimer, I had to documentate myself and tried to create something interacting like mini-games through the dialogues to make the players interact directly with the illness and it's impact on people.
👾 Gameplay
Basicly the game is really simple, the players only have to click to pass the dialogues and play the little mini games with their mouses.
Since it's a really short and linear game, the dialogues will follow each others and the players just have to click. When a mini game occurs, the players will be able to interact and complete them easily.
The objective of the game was to make a driven narrative story with some mini games to create more interactions and comprehension of the illness and impact of it on the daily life of thoses persons.
👨💻 What I've realized on the project
-
Dialogues
With Yann, the 2nd Game Artist of the game, him and me wrote the dialogues lines and character and place of each characters of the game.
I wanted to create a smooth story where the players can easily understand what is happening, how they are impacting the story and what are the objective from each characters.
All the characters
- Father : He is the one suffering from Alzheimer, he's still living his life with his kids in a nice house even tho his memory loss
and impact from the illness make his life way harder in the daily basis
- Grandma : She is still living with his son and grandchildrens, tormented by the loss of her beloved husband but really happy
to spend some good time with the family
- Grandpa : Passed away years ago, was rough but a good father to his kid, teaching him maners and how to live. Probably his roughness
made his relation with his son harder during his last moments in the hospital
- Daughter : The oldest of the childrens, she had to learn life the hard way by taking care of her father with his illness.
But she is happy and enjoy life with her two demonic little brothers
- Twins : Energetic little monsters, they spend their time outside fighting togethers,
crafting wooden house and exploring the woods surrounding the house
-
Interactive mini games
The Smoke
The first mini game start when the grandma speak about a spider that the twins should go dig down in the garden. This interaction has for objective to make the father understand what she is saying with his thoughs completly confused in his head.
A chatbox appears full of smoke clouds and the player has to make them dissapear with the mouse cursor, once all the clouds are gone the text can finally appear.
The Rain
All about a sad and emotional event, this one occurs when, lost in his head, the father feel like seeing and speaking to his passed father, they speak about how kind he has to be when an animal or living creature die. Digging a grave and saying few words from the heart.
Once again a chatbox appear, with invisible words on it, a little fuse start to burn, there is rain in the chatbox and the mouse cursor is this time an umbrella. The player has to cover the burning fuse from the rain to make the whole word appear (when the fuse burn, the word start appearing letters by letters behind it). Once an entire word is discovered, a new fuse / new word start to burn so the player has to move the mouse quickly to cover it from the rain too.
If the rain touch the fuse, the word reset and the player has to come back on the beginning of the burning to fuse again.
(Punishements?)
Since it's supposed to be a narrative oriented game, I didn't want to player to lose in anyway, having to restart dialogues that does not change can be a lot of frustrations for the players, so instead it was just quick reset as punishement for fails, but not big deal.
📌 Lessons Learned
- I've learn that it's way harder for a little project like this one to be able the characters really impactant for the players, as well as the story.
- I feel like the game is lacking of interaction, mini games and dialogue possibility to make less of an "skip the dialogue simulator".
- I still liked the project in term of art and design of the universe, would have definitly loved to make the narration a bit less deep and more entraining for the players, so they catch up with the father instantly and have more fun or understanding playing and interacting with the different family members.
⚡ Quick infos
Project made in 3 Weeks (Only during free time)
The game got nominated at the Hauts-de-Seine Festival along with the others game from the 18+y category
The team :
- Game Artists : Lucio Mazza & Yann Gigez
- Programmers : Victor Lacombe & Gabriel Le Mer
- Designer : Me
The game is not playable, we decided to not publish it since it's a short project and we would have wish to have more time to work on it to fully show the story and experience
