Washed Out (2019)
Narrative Game
Game Design and Narrative
Washed Out is a short narrative game that shows a day in the life on an introvert.
Credits:
Fabian Krzich - Music and Sound Design
Valerie Lemuth - Programming
Yasemin Yağcı - Art and Visual Design
Washed Out is an atmospheric narrative about a day in the life of an introvert. Al is supposed to go out and meet a friend, but is afraid of facing the world outside the house.
I was responsible for taking the group's ideas and designing the gameplay loop, as well as the game's script. The game was developed in the Unity3D development platform.
The initial concept was that the world was turned grey and the main character needed to restore the colors. I developed the concept further into the idea that the world was perceived gray by the main character and the way to restore colors was to experience emotions.
I then made associations between certain colors and which emotions they would be associated with. By restoring all the primary colors in the RGB system, all the others would follow. The player would then go around the town and experience the colors in different places.
Since all of the team members were only beginning to work with Unity3D and we only had one semester, we decided to simplify the concept by working with a desaturated environment, rather than completely gray, with the progression of the game leading to a resaturation. I wrote the script that led the story up until the first color: red.
I wrote the red scene as tied with emotions of love and warmth, represented by the sunset and the care between Al and a friend, who talk about their feelings and how to deal with sadness. In the dialogue, the friend mentions art and creativity as a coping mechanism and suggests writing a poem.
Since we wanted to further explore Al's state of mind, we decided to include a level where the player dives into Al's mind to write a poem about their feelings, prompted by the friend. This section is explored as a maze, in which the player must go back and forth between the two sides of the screen in order to collect words for the poem.
