Imprint — A little journey
THE STORY
Imprint is a small narrative playable experience about my personal journey of when I made the decision to leave my home in South Africa and move abroad for a chance at a better life.
Throughout my travels, I have had many ups and downs and have constantly questioned my decisions. I missed home and my family so much, but I knew my life abroad would give me things in life that I craved so much such as traveling and furthering my studies.
The game follows the character Toot, who represents me. Toot was a nickname that my father has always called me, so it seemed fitting to name the character after this term of endearment.
The player follows some critical moments in Toot’s life and how she came to understand what was most important to her, which is people.
The player will get to decide which part of Toot’s travels they visit. The different places and countries should be viewed in a specific order to help the story unravel. Currently, only Thailand has been developed and the others are going to be developed. I would like to continue this game after my studies as a personal ‘journal’ of my travels and important moments and people in my life that have imprinted on me.
THE CHARACTERS
Toot
In the introduction, you get to meet Toot and her dad back home in South Africa. Her dad is the reason that she found the courage to go abroad at all, and the support he gives her in the decision is a critical point in her life.
When you visit Thailand with Toot, there are three main stories and characters that impacted her life immensely and how she dealt with living in a foreign country with a new language and culture.
Aof
At a time when Toot was too afraid, self-conscious, and nervous to even order food, a local food vendor in Bangkok gave Toot some confidence when she embraced her, asked her questions, and helped her to learn some Thai. This was an important moment for Toot, because after this encounter Toot felt confident to try to speak Thai to other people in the city and realized that even if she failed at the language, she had tried, and she was learning.
Tannie
This character is based on a high school friend from South Africa, Tammie. Toot had been through some personal trauma just before they met, and Tannie arrived in her life when she most needed a friendly face from home who could understand everything she had gone through. Tannie was a beacon of support and motivation and gave Toot back her passion to push for what she wanted in life.
Syanide
He is based on a real person, Syed. He very quickly became one of Toot’s best friends and he opened her eyes to the fact that she was not alone. There were other people out there who needed the same things she did, companionship, and who had also been through a difficult time to get where they were. It helped her to be strong and push forward with her dreams.
NARRATIVE BRANCHES
With each encounter she has with each of these people, she is faced with a decision that would change her life and either end the story or progress in the story. With each decision she takes to push forward, she gets to meet the next person and learn the next lesson in her life. And with each lesson she learns, she becomes stronger.
If the other option is chosen in the narrative, Toot decides to return to South Africa, and in turn, she will not meet the next person, and she will not gain those values, friendships, and support. If she returns to South Africa, she does not get to achieve her life goals.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
The intention was to have a few of the different countries developed, but due to the variety of characters, character expressions, and backgrounds needed to create the scenes, I opted to have Thailand developed only with the others marked as ‘coming soon’.
When you play through the Thailand story, there is an end to the game. There are lessons learned, there is character development and progression and you either see Toot succeed or fail at her initial goal.
As a personal project, I would like to continue to develop the encounters I had in each country, to keep as a personal playable journal for myself. In each place I have met or encountered people who have changed moments in my life and when I started the game, I did not realize that I would want to develop it further.
Since I created all the artwork myself as well as developing the game and writing the script, I ran into some time constraints and that is when I decided to only develop Thailand and endeavored to portray a meaningful message in that part of the experience.
I feel like I picked up on Fungus relatively quickly, but when I had built the full experience, I playtested it many times through in Unity, but when I exported it and uploaded it to Itch.io some of the background images were appearing when they should not be showing. When I went back to double-check the game and played through in Unity it was playing through correctly. So, I had many builds, exports, and uploads to Itch.io before it was working correctly. I still have not figured out the issue, as it was working smoothly in Unity.
In many of the scenes, I had to go back and add in a fade sprite command to ensure that background was not appearing in the build, even though it was not visible in the Unity engine. I had quite a bit of time spent on this issue.
Music, I did not add music to the game, and I think that this would have greatly enhanced the emotions in each scene. It will be something that I will go back and add.
WHAT WENT WELL?
The artwork of the characters was a great moment for me. I am highly inspired by Tim Burton and I had hoped to create my own style that gave this type of feeling. The goal with the characters was also to be able to change their hair, facial expressions, and clothes to who emotion, growth, and a variety of characters.
Overall, I am quite pleased with this element and was able to quickly change the expressions for specific scenes and encounters in the game.
The game had the intention to give a message to the viewer, a message that is important to me and that I learned in my time abroad. No matter what you have in life, you do need those special people in your life to help you, support you and you get to do the same for them when you need it. No number of glamourous parties, vacations, and events can replace that special bond with people you encounter in your life.
I feel like I managed to get that message across in the game and hope that other people playing can resonate with this when they play through.
Creating different backgrounds for different moments in Toot’s life was important to me. There are places that I spent with each person that will always remind me of them. Tammie and I spent loads of time in her apartment, with all her beautiful art, so I wanted to make sure that when Toot meets Tannie, it gave me the feeling that I was back in that apartment with her.
DEVELOPMENT WITH FUNGUS
Although I am very new to Fungus, I found a tutorial on sale which showed me some new tricks and helped me a lot with this game.
I found it easier to create the game in one Unity scene, with a variety of flowcharts, labeled so that I could easily make edits and use the call command to move throughout the flowcharts easily.
The Start Screen was created using artwork I had created, but I made sure to export all the elements as separate images, such as the background, the stars, the path, the name of the game, etc all as different objects. This allowed me to fade in or out certain elements of the start screen to create something a little more cinematic for the player.
I used a few different Views to allow the camera to move from the left of the screen and pan upwards towards the moon. As the camera moves towards the name of the game ‘Imprint’ the word fades in, and then the camera pans out to show more of the screen where I faded in ‘created by’.
To allow the player to easily understand how to start the game, I used the ‘clickable sprite’ option in fungus and imported my own start button. I then used an iTween punch scale, to make the start button bounce a little so that it attracts the player's attention to start the game. This button then links to the introduction flow chart where the story begins. At this point, players will see the introduction text and will be given a choice to go ahead with the story (Heck yes!) or stop the game (Naah!) and this option leads the player to the credits screen where they can either quit or restart the game.
Game Loop
Imprint contains a game loop in a sense. Each character that you meet you have the choice to go forward or give up, each time Toot gives up she ends back where she started, and the outcome is the same for each encounter. Ultimately this is Toot’s worst nightmare and at every turn in her life and in the game, she faces this nightmare. When times get hard, she is on the verge of giving up, but always finds a way to persevere.
I created a flowchart for Toot going home, and all three situations can loop back to this same flowchart which allowed me to create the game loop in a way that used my time and developing in a productive manner.
OVERALL
This is my first narrative game and first time developing a game with Fungus. I really enjoy the plugin, especially being an artist, as I can focus on telling a story and the art to support that story. I will definitely learn more about it and try to improve on my storytelling skills for future projects.
