#narrativedesign

Initial Start.

Once you have the Lantern you’re able to use it as a way to shoo off the “Coyotes”(Menacing dog thing) so you can move further into the cave to progress.

A hole in the wall designed to lead the players eye to the goal of rescuing the Dog, using light and the same particle effect used on the lantern to draw the players eye.

My favourite part of this game is the bridge. As you cross the bridge, the audio sounds as if it about to break, it breaks in. And then a splash audio track plays as you hit the ground.

The goal of this game is to rescue Marigold(your pet dog) who has been injured somehow. This is known to the player by the whining dog audio track that players once near Marigold. Then you leave the cave, with marigold.

Other notes: 

-I used the colour grey to lead the player through the level, even though the level may seem pretty straight forward I felt it needed to be more understandable for the players.

- Also used water droplet particle effects to lead the player, and also emphasize the cold, dampness of the cavern.

- A stream was also in place at first for enviroment art, but then I used it to lead the player in the right direction also. This was a tricky bit, as I created the shader in shaderforge, and making the water move was perhaps to technical for me at the time, but with the help of a couple of tutorials and assistance of my teacher, I worked it out.

Journey is a masterpiece, it has changed the way I play games, the way I approach game design and ultimately set the bar very high for anything to do with games.

Looking at it through the eye of Narrative Design, there were a few things I missed the first time around. We also talked about it being a direct correlation to “The Hero’s Journey”, the monomyth created by Joseph Campbell to talk about the stages of narrative development. Which in itself was fascinating.

1. The colour transition. I noticed the colours changing, of course, but I hadn’t looked at it as a way of differentiating between levels. It never clicked that the colours were there to invoke an emotional response, I thought it was purely a level design choice.

2. The Fade to White transitioning to a Fade to Black. The fades are used to go from level to level. Or, as thresholds (newly acquired word as of today!), and the fade to white is used throughout the whole game except for one occasion; the section where the player is supposed to feel helpless. All is lost, the low-point in the story, or otherwise known as the “Belly of the Beast”.