💎 Pitch
Welcome to the year 2050, a time when the future and new technologies are the order of the day! What better experience than bringing up a child for the first time? Helping a couple raise one?
As a household AI, accompany and help Lucio and Joelle in their first steps as parents, the panic to get to the hospital for the birth, the first night with a baby at home, the first tears, the first nappy to be changed.
🌟 Introduction
Hello World is an interactive narrative game produced as part of the Hauts-De-Seine festival.
We made this little game apart from our school projects and classes to participate to the Hauts-De-Seine festival, a little championship where lots of schools of our region participate each years to make the best of games. The theme of games for this festival were "Life".
My Objectives for the project were to make a little interactive game mostly story driven, but with little things to do, a bit like if the player could really feel like helping the family.
👾 Gameplay
Since it was a short game for an festival, we made it really easy to understand and play, basicly it's very narrativly driven, the players simply has to click or drag & drop to interact in the game.
The game mix dialogue sequences with interactions where the player has to move objects to complete some tasks given by the couple.
Most of the tasks are like, bring the backpack to the husband, or the baby stuff to the wife.. etc...
The story being kinda short, we wanted to have slightly more dialogue and narrative interactions for the players to understand the story and be dragged into the couple's mind.
👨💻 What I've realized on the project
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Concepting the idea
The brainstorming was really quick, the theme of the festival being "Life", we wanted to make an playable experience that would go further than just a game for fun.. That's why we though of an story about the creation of life, though a newborn baby and the first step of a "family" as.. A couple beginning parents.
So we had the idea of the couple beginning a family, and now where to place the player ? He had to be auxiliary to the couple, without being too close or too distant. So in a futur, creating an AI-Companion inside of the house could fit the idea.
That's how simple we made the idea of the game !
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Writing the dialogues
This one wasn't that easy, I'm used to write a lot and so having no issue idealizing what someone would say. But about imagining what the first steps of becoming a family are, it was different for me !
So I interrogated my mom and friends that could have childrens to learn more about their best and worst moments, to create an emotive story for the game.
Of course it had to start by the very beginning, end of pregnancy, stress of the baby incoming, the rush to hospital, etc.. So that was the idea behind writing the story !
📌 Lessons Learned
How to write and work with feelings and emotions to make the players feel what we want them to.
I learnt the importance of a good writing, speaking through the voice of the character and not just as a blank entity. It needs a soul, a charm and a personnality to work proprely, whatever the story is.
Even with a short story / game / experience, it's still super important to do quality first over quantity.
⚡ Quick infos
Project made in 3 Weeks (Only during free time)
The game got nominated and awarded with 2nd place in the Haut-de-Seine Festival 2024
The team :
Artist - Lucio Mazza & Avin Calame
Programmer - Gabriel Le Mer
Designer - Alexandre Foussat
The game is not playable, we decided not to publish it since it's a short project, we would have wanted to have more time working on it to fully show the story and experience.
