A ghost story set in Japan.
This narrative puzzle takes place on a spooky, rainy night. The protagonist Yoshimi is a distracted student who is kidnapped to another reality. Stranded in a strange and unfamiliar place, she must rediscover her spiritual roots to find a path home.
Box vs. Spline rigged camera
The story unfolds as the player walks from end to end in this 3D sidescroller. The side-view camera system switches between a camera box and a fixed spline for controlling focus throughout. Trigger areas alter the camera distance and the camera box catches up on exit.
Paper Mapping
Conceptual diagrams were drawn to align story beats to the player path. At certain points we denoted transitions between a sidescrolling perspective to the cinematic sequencer.
Dialogue delivery texts and subtitles
Animated UI widgets convey the story through phone messages, in addition to audio and subtitles in cutscenes. For ambient & situational dialogue, a text bubble widget translated audible messages. Phone messages and sequences are triggered separately from audio cues because they were often needed to direct a potentially lost player.
Level streaming for world composition
Levels were chunked into sublevels so that our team could work on different parts of the world at the same time. These were later stitched together using world building tools to stream load relevant levels during runtime.
Aimi Watanabe - Level Design, Scripting, Audio, UI
Ian Miley - Modeling, Concept Art, and Marketing Art
Heng-En Tsao - Environment, Production