Essence of the Past Windows game

We are the Brainless Bunch, a Portuguese game developer team.

Welcome to our third article about the game we are developing, Essence of the Past.

Essence of the Past is a game about a woman going back to her abandoned childhood home, initially with the intent of selling it.

Our game explores the perspective of someone struggling to reconnect with her past and going back in time through memories captured by Polaroids scattered around time and space.

After yesterday's post announcing both our new studio image and the release of our game demo, we bring you an update-filled devlog to put you up to pair with everything (except for the things that featured on the past devlogs) we've done up till the moment of the release!

Design

The designer is tasked with the definition of the core aspects of the game, such as the story, the genre, the target audience, the mechanics, and so on. As such we'll be giving you a little sneak peek at the narrative of our game and both the gameplay loop and the retention loop!

• Narrative (Plot and Characters)

Our game takes place in an old traditional portuguese home, where the family used to reside. We play as Laura, the last living member of the family, returning to that old house after her mother's death, 5 years ago. Amid the chaos of a house left to rot, Laura finds Polaroid photos spread around, from the now empty photo album her family kept since her grandmother's time. Laura must now find all the polaroids and return them to the photo album, to keep it as a memento before selling the house.

In this story, there are 3 characters of notice, including our protagonist, Laura, with whom we will start the introductions.

Laura is a woman in her 40's. She has let go of her spiritualism as a result of integrating herself into modern society, losing touch with a core part of herself. She is slightly apathetic and lonely but incredibly hardworking and dedicated to her job as an office worker. She moved out of her family’s house when she reached 25, 15 years before her mother died in 2015. 5 years later she goes back to retrieve anything of importance that could have been left behind and to see if the house is worth selling or not. As a kid she was inclined to misbehave, being known as a “bad” kid, growing up to be a teenager who strongly values her self-sufficiency, having a hard time asking for help, and causing a rift in her relationship with her mother who is an austere woman with a judgmental streak.

Laura’s mother, Margarida, was an austere woman who deeply valued her relationship with her daughter despite being very rigid with her and not being fully able to communicate with her. Having died in 2015, at 70, and being the only person that lived there at the moment of her death, she left the house to her daughter, and from that moment it was left empty until she decided to visit in 2020. As a kid she was spirited, being known as an active but still agreeable child by the community. Was raised in a very relaxed way by her mother, causing her to be a somewhat self-centered rebel. She eventually got married and grew into a hypercritical woman, being known as wise but strict by the people who surrounded her, including her family.

Laura’s grandmother, Carmen, was a prideful and powerful woman, being the one who had the strongest connection with the spiritual world. She was a great team worker, helping the other women in the community and forming strong bonds. She raised Margarida with the help of the women around her, keeping a very loose grip on her, as such she grows detached from her. There's no register of her childhood, but one might assume that she was a well-behaved kid, growing into an empowered woman thanks to her ability to connect with others.

• Gameplay and Retention Loop

To truly organize our game and to decide how it would be enjoyed, we created both a gameplay loop and a retention loop.

The gameplay loop is used as a way to visualize what are the actions that the player will take and how they connect with each other making a cycle! This makes it so that the player won't feel like their progress has been halted due to taking an action that doesn't lead anywhere. As shown below, regardless of the action the player takes, they will always have a follow-up action!

Similarly to the gameplay loop, the retention loop keeps the player engaged, making sure none of their efforts go unrewarded, making their experience much more enjoyable! Like this, the player will always have a meaningful goal to pursue until the end of the game, giving them a sense of progression and contributing to the game's longevity!

Art

As always, our artist was working hard the past week, designing visual solutions for our game! As such, today we have some more things to show you from them!

• Color Studies

As with most things, our game relies on its color in order to get the message of their atmosphere across, so we experimented with a couple of color combinations to see what fit our game's theme the best.

• Palette

Having observed the color scheme that fits us best, a couple of color palettes got crafted, to visualize them individually. Like this, we are able to make decisions in the future regarding how every aspect of our game will look, color-wise.

Programming

Finally, this is where the actual creation of our recently released game demo took place, in the programming field. Having been working on this playable build from the very start, we are proud we finally got to share it with you all! Now we'll go take a look at how each of the mechanics we created for our game were implemented in the demo.

• Mechanics

Starting with the hidden game object, we are able to pick up the Polaroid photos where the game will take place, click on all the objects that the silhouettes ask us to find and complete the game. turn the Polaroid around to read the letter left by the owner.

After collecting both polaroids and solving them, we can head to the clock to input the time that was implied on the letters by moving the pointers around. By inputting the right hours and minutes, the game is won and the pointers start spinning wildly as the screen fades to black.

There are still lots of things for us to add, but since these were the main features we wanted to implement we decided to only focus on those for this playable build.

Brainless Bunch