When we originally sat down to brainstorm the game we decided we wanted to do a very story based game. We gathered our inspirations together and Megan made this moodboard with various games and styles we were inspired by. What we came up with was Arlo, a game where you play as a child's imaginary friend, helping him through various trials and protecting him from monsters made from his own imagination. Although it would be in 3D we wanted to keep it styalised and make it pretty colourful, taking inspiration for the monsters from the Babadook film and Madoka show, with the black shadowy outlines of people, hands and animals. After looking into some games we figured we could consider our game a hybrid between Beyond Two Souls and Gone Home, with strong story elements and no ability to fight back. Within this vertical slice we are aiming to make a small section where you need to go down to the basement where the child's mother has taken the key to his room. You must retrieve this key without waking her and return to the boy and let him out of his room.
Because the whole game would be based inside the house it was important that we locked down the floor plan before we started putting anything into Unity. I made this floorplan, laying out the space for a 4 person family. The top image is the bottom floor, and the bottom the top floor. The square space to the right of the bottom floor is intended to be the garage but in this slice the player is not supposed to be able to enter that place and we would not be modelling it. Our plan is to model all the large furniture pieces first so as to fill up the house as quickly as we can and then if there's time at the end to model house filler items to make it seem more lived in.
We decided we would all come up with concepts and then regroup and pick what we liked from everyone's ideas for the final one. Here are some of my ideas for AJ, the child. It seemed it was something we all agreed on that he would have dark hair as we all drew him like that. My personal favourite from these is the first one as I think the hair looks the best in that one. Sophie was assigned the lead 2D artist and she blocked up the final designs for the mother and the child.
Although it was no needed in the end I did some potential concepts for AJ's brother incase we needed to make a design for him if we ever got around to making photo frames.
We all had a go at making kiddy drawings to place around the house, I did this one but forgot about it and so didn't end up doing anything with it for the project. I still like it though and it was fun trying to draw like a 7 year old.
These were my ideas for what the mother would look like. I also added a few ideas to her face for perhaps what she would look like in the child's mind. We planned for her to have stages in her transformation as originally we thought there could be a fight against her, however we thought this would be too difficult and so opted out of combat and stages. I liked the idea of her just being a scribbly face as I think it matched her drinking problem and the idea that she's not in her right mind.
Instead of having a transformation sequence we thought about having just a monster instead of the mother. These were my ideas for the mother as a monster. I like the idea of her just being a black shape, and because I drew her with blonde hair I thought it would be cool if we could get that to contrast against the black. However this would be too difficult for us to do in the timeframe as we don't know how to animate or model hair to that level yet. I also liked the idea of her being like a ghost without much texture, just being a mat black which I thought would look quite cool. I prefer the first one to the second one but we ended up just having her as a mother rather than having her as a monster.
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