Into The Forest

Introduction

One of the projects in the Creative Technology course consists of making a 3D game in Unity in teams of two people. We started of our development with a couple of brainstorming sessions in which we quickly decided we wanted to make a more story based game. Our idea for a game was more an experience rather than a puzzle, strategy or fighting games. We wanted to deliver an immersive experience to the player. We tried to achieve this by having environmental storytelling and an interesting art style.

An in game camera panning towards the title card of into the forest hovering in front of some trees.

Prototyping

We started of the development by demoing individual pieces of the gameplay. We started of by implementing the YarnSpinner dialogue system, which is an incredibly flexible dialogue system and a very easy way to write complex and nonlinear narrative. We set up a simple scene with a player and an NPC which were both boxes and made it possible to simply move around the scene and start a fun little dialogue with the NPC.

The YarnSpinner system also allows for choices and function calls from within the dialogue. Making it possible to remember the players choices or trigger an event within the game’s code. For the demo we made it possible to push the NPC off of the plane the characters were standing on. This was simply done by adding a script to the NPC and a choice in the dialogue.

Story

Our game’s simple story arose later on in the process. The outline of the story is as follows:

You wake up, and find yourself in a forest. A nice, open, peaceful forest, where you are surrounded by flowers and bathe in sunlight. Everything feels so peaceful at first. You’re able to talk to animals, who surprisingly, talk back. Though there is something a little off about what they say. You then encounter a mysterious spirit that tells you to follow them. Your journey starts, and you follow the path that lies ahead. Slowly, you notice that the open and peaceful forest starts to become more grim and less welcoming. The creatures you encounter start to give alarming messages about the journey ahead. You don’t know what it is, and you are scared yet intrigued to find out. The spirit you then encounter also encourages you to continue your path.