Notes from the Apocalypse
Solo Project - Unity 3D
Notes from the Apocalypse is a short, first-person narrative game where the player explores an abandoned house where they learn about the family that lived there through notes left throughout the house. I worked on this game for a month as part of a final project for an interactive narrative course.
When coming up with the story of this game, I wanted it to be a very physical story. Meaning, I wanted the house to tell the story in a way that the notes were there to supplement and give context to the environment.
During my writing process, I had started with a slightly larger cast of characters, a whole family really, but when I felt that wasn’t feasible I scoped it down to just three. This was also due to the size of the environment I was going to create, the more characters, the more notes, the bigger the house.
As someone who creates stories based on visuals and moments, I find pure writing more difficult. When I started writing, I outlined my three characters with basic traits, things that could be mentioned in the notes to give personality to them. I ultimately decided that the notes would be written from the perspective of only one character. In doing so, I made who that character was very ambiguous, I didn’t give them a name or gender. I gave myself a maximum of ten notes to tell the story, in which I outlined the overall arc and content of each before actually writing them. I also added a few flavor notes, smaller notes that gave interest to the environment, and made it appear as if these events actually occurred.
Narrative
Systems and Environment Design
The earliest prototype of the game contained a simple first-person player controller in which, the player could interact with an object within a certain trigger zone to open the note UI. In that UI, the player’s movement was disabled, but they were given mouse control to those UI elements.
Later on, when I implemented the actual note asset, I had originally planned for the note interface to have arrow buttons to change the page of a note. Ideally, I would have done this by using an array that stored each note, and other logic to determine if a note had more than one page or not. With the current scope and other time constraints, I ended up just using a simple scrollbar and focused my time more on the environment.
With a timeline of about a month, I had to consider how I wanted the player to move through the environment. I also had to consider art, since I was working in a 3D engine which led me to use pre-made assets. It was actually the asset pack itself that inspired the story, the amount of customization it gave, as well as the sheer variety of assets(that, and it was 90% off at the time).
With the amount of assets and customization, it became overwhelming to try and build an environment from scratch. I ended up using an interior base of the house where I made some layout changes and then populating it with interior assets.
With such a linear story, I had to consider how the player would move about the space, and also make sense of the notes. Ideally, the player would read all the notes, not necessarily in order, to understand the story. One way I went about this was by writing dates on all the notes, so even if read out of order, the player would know if they were missing one. I also locked off the final note of the game to avoid arriving at the end too early on, the player has to find a key in order to get to the last note. While this is very common and somewhat stale gameplay it does add another element of interaction to the game, but it also serves as an incentive to exploration.