Some excerpts from my GDD solo project, an escape room, combining AR elements, designed to simulate the feeling of confronting your mum for hitting you as a child and her responding that it never happened.
The players would enter a room designed to look like a wake and each interact with a different character present at the funeral. Each character tells the story of the dead, the main character's mother, in radically different ways. The players reconvene at the end and share their experiences
The initial idea, and my favourite, was to drive the players towards a fake win state: determining whether the mother was a good or a bad person. The real intention was posing an impossible question to answer, causing stress and anger in the players.
The style was a collaged version of paper puppetry for the AR element. I used the language of flowers and animal symbolism to conceal their faces and subtly hint at their character.
General aesthetic collages.
Paper puppets template examples.
There were five characters designed for this game, not including Mother and the PC, These are the notes for the two paper puppets above.
Literally a physical room, everything from sound playing from a radio in it to the smell of it was accounted for.
This game’s core gameplay revolved around listening and observing. There was no combat involved and no puzzle solving in the traditional sense. Players would have been able to interact with diegetic elements to construct a narrative. Each player would have gotten contradictory information from an AR interaction with a character, telling their version of the same story. The game explored the idea of using the players themselves as hardware.
