💎 Pitch
It’s already late, Sarah. You should head home... This week has been exhausting, hasn’t it?
But you’d better be quick, I heard there are issues with public transport in the city tonight.
/!\ Sadly, since the internship ended, I couldn’t get any images of the game or development.
🌟 Introduction
Going Home is a game where Sarah (the playable character), after a long week of work, tries to return to her house... but faces a massive number of obstacles along the way. From the subway and metro being down, to strangers asking for help or directions, and even some dangers...
It’s a narrative point-and-click adventure game. Players slowly discover the semi-futuristic city where Sarah lives, its citizens and their secrets. Events unfold involving politics, industrial changes, and even secret societies.
Players move through different scenes, streets, buildings, rooms, each filled with characters and citizens, all with their own paths and stories.
I worked on this game during my internship at Microïds Studio Paris (MSP). It was a brand-new project, built from scratch, so everything had to be imagined and created. We were two working full-time on it, starting with the universe and story setup based on the Game Directors’ vision. We brainstormed around ideas like temporal loops, how the player moves through the city, and whether the story should be linear or allow exploration beyond the main plot.
We answered all those questions during the 3 months I worked on the project (only 3 months because my internship ended), and it was a fascinating experience full of lessons.
My objectives for the project were:
- Creating a unique universe (as original and strange as possible, while fitting the vision)
- Imagining charismatic citizens for the city
- Setting up a prototype to "sell" the idea to the Game Directors
- Designing the dialogue and interaction system (this part was really tough)
- Making a game that’s simple but deep, so players who get lost in the story can still understand it and want to learn more about the lore
👾 Gameplay
As a 3D visual novel action-adventure, players click on different elements on the screen to interact.
You can talk to NPCs, open doors, search trash bins, or buy a drink. Each scene and location in the city offers lots of possibilities.
Your goal is to get home, but you’ll face many challenges. You might want to learn more about certain NPCs, help them, earn money by completing tasks, or spend it on food and drinks to survive the night after your exhausting work week.
We wanted the game to feel like a chaos box of possibilities, full of different situations, people to meet, places to visit, and objects to interact with.
📃 What I've realized on the project
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Start of the project
Since I joined during the early stages, we were two Game Designers starting from scratch.
We defined who the player is, what city and era the game takes place in, the lore of the universe, and the rules of the world. We spent a lot of time figuring out the player’s objective and how they’re supposed to play.
We had deep discussions about whether players could lose, by dying or not reaching home in time. That raised tough questions: Do they keep their knowledge after reviving? Does the world know they died? Is it the same character or a new one? All those questions took time to explore, and it was exciting to build a whole world from scratch.
📌 Lessons Learned
- Since I worked on the project for only a few months, we had weekly meetings to lock things down and avoid changing them. But the hard part was that most features still kept evolving week after week.
- The biggest lesson I learned was to set things quickly and avoid changing them unless there’s a really good reason.
- It was an amazing experience to work on a brand-new project during a simple internship.
âš¡ Quick infos
Project is still ongoing. I worked on it for 3 months using Unity.
The game is still in development and not playable yet.
