Brainstorming
At first, the idea I had was not related to photos at all, rather, it was an entirely different story of the player playing an emotional support dog to help their owner through their day.
However, my teammate was not fully into the idea and he suggested an idea of a photobook, where you get to look through a person's entire life through a photobook, and when you select photos, you get to see and interact with the event that played out when that photo was being taken.
I suggested to my team the idea of letting the player restore old photos and watch said photos come back to life. I figured that it would be a unique game that would give players a bit of an insight into this niche job. My teammates decided to go with the idea and we started discussing the details.
Short Stories For Each Customer
When thinking of the stories, I wanted the photos to reveal interesting parts of the customer's past. When giving examples to my teammates, I suggested a simple one where a sweet old granny wants to restore an old photograph of her dancing at a club, to suggest a wild side underneath her sweet and gentle exterior. We did end up using this small example as the first story for the game.
After that, I pitched that we have 2 more customers with 3 photos each, but that was overscoped for the artists, so we downscoped to just 1 customer.
Working With Artists
This is the first project that designers were tasked to work together with students of another course. Being an artist myself, I was familiar with the process of conceptualizing and making art assets for game projects, so, understanding their work process wasn't difficult. However, they were quite shy to give input during discussions, so I told them to sketch out their idea concepts and show them to me. I was happy with what they had in mind for the photo sequences and art style, so I gave them the green light.
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Along the way, we ran into importing problems with Unity and had to tell our artists to keep their canvases within a range of dimensions.
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The animations were done with video editing and played during the game to give the illusion of the photos coming to life. It was smooth and we were happy with the results.
Design Process
While we had our core idea set in stone, the gameplay we had in mind was too technically advanced for us designers to achieve. So, while discussing with our lecturer and TAs, we came to the conclusion that we don't need to give the players so much freedom with the photos, we just need to give them the illusion that they are indeed fixing the photos themselves.
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We decided that our gameplay will be simple and straightforward, making our idea less of a puzzle game and more of an interactive experience instead. We also decided to split the photo fixing into 3 sections: Physical, Digital, and Printing. In between the sections are small animations that give the player buffer and small breadcrumb rewards before the final animation that plays after the photo is completely fixed.
Scripting
Since we had no programmers, gameplay scripting was entirely up to us, so my fellow designer and I split our workload. I was left in charge of the dialogue system, story, and audio. My friend was in charge of the photo restoration gameplay and UI.
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While scripting the audio, I decided to make it so that the audio would be slowed down at first, then, slowly sped up back to normal as the player restores the photo. So, the reward was not just the visuals but also the audio.
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Our work was conveniently split into separate scenes so we could both work on the project at the same time. It was probably the most efficient workflow I ever had with Unity projects.
Visual Storytelling
The core idea of our game was to allow the players to learn about the customers' past by restoring their photos. As the player slowly restores the photo, it begins to slowly come to life as the player could see bits of animation in the photo. It "teases" the player to keep going and at the end, they are presented with the full animation of the photo, uncovering the story behind the photograph. Each photo tells a story in sequence, and after finishing the 3 photos, you get the full story. Unfortunately, we couldn't explore this as much due to time constraints.
Post Mortem
In the end, we were able to create a product we all liked. Though it was a shame we couldn't go with more than 1 story pitch due to time constraints, the final product was well-polished. It was my first time scripting a dialogue system that looks similar to that of text messages, so it was a bit challenging to figure out the best way to do it. But when I completed it, I ended up referencing this project for future projects that need a dialogue system. This project also helped me realize that I was better at building upon ideas rather than proposing them.
