End Of The World

You can download and play the game on itch!

For my third semester at the UE Berlin I had to create a game each week, and this game was made for the theme "End Of The World". I took some time thinking about what that could mean to me, what I would like to do - and ended up at my personal biggest Calamity: The death of my father.
As that was a topic I felt I wanted to make on my own, I decided to try this project without the help of others. I wanted to do code, narrative and art at the same time, to make it a game for me and my dad.

Before I did anything else, I wanted to see if I could actually do the art myself. I felt confident with my narrative design and had done the code for the last couple of weekly games - but art was something I hadn't actively worked on for a project. My goal was to create a game showing my emotional state at the time: Distant, hollow, emotionless. I had played with Unity's shaders and shadergraph before, I had an idea what I wanted to do: A noisy outline shader on low poly objects. Testing out different solutions and ideas, I found a nice outline shader on the internet, which I then plugged into shadergraph to modify it with noise. I tried it on a low poly human and was very happy with the result! I felt good enough with the art that I could look into this narrative design, as I had an idea what I could do with this particular art style as a tool.

The outline shader in action.

Trying to take care of yourself.

I started with the idea of depicting decay as emphasized change: Repeating loops of scenes (school, hospital, home), with only the interaction in the hospital changing. I wanted to show my father's decline of first physical, then mental capabilities. His loss of speech. The tiredness. But as soon as I finished the structure and started writing the first lines, I realized: I won't be able to finish this in one week. Because as it turns out, dealing with and writing about personal trauma is incredibly hard and time consuming - especially if you think you are already over it. The process slowed down and I had to decide: Am I going to try to finish my initial plan by working instead of sleeping or am I going to cut and switch tracks? I went with the latter. Instead of having a cycle repeat seven times with different narration and a changing interaction, I cut down to two repeats with only a little bit of interaction. Instead of the emphasis on decay I shifted the focus to be on the other protagonist: You, me, the player. Thinking back on the dissociation, the hollowness I felt back then.