Play Game

-Overview-

Development Time: April 2022 - May 2022

Development Tools: Unity, Maya

Genre: Narrative-Driven

-Game Intent-

The intent behind Blockman & You was to create an environmental storytelling game where players come to understand the lived experiences of their father- Blockman- through the discovery of personal items throughout the environment. This experience is meant to evoke feelings of both curiosity and subtle sadness as players come to understand some realistic tragedies behind the game’s narrative.  The experience was achieved by having a contained, explorable environment wherein players could interact with and discover items that pertained to the lived experiences of Blockman. This was done overall to create a game whose inherent purpose is to retell the life of a person without ever interacting with them personally, and remembering said person through what they left behind.

-Design Process-

The development of Blockman & You began with the concept of creating an "Altered States" system- Altered States being defined as "helping players use their imagination to believe in an alternate world". I began firstly by conceiving ways to translate this definition into a playable experience, and what game / genre could best fit into this idea of immersion and believability. What I concluded this brainstorming with was simply a name: "Blockman & You", and from there, my design process took off.

I knew what I wanted to ultimately create was a story-driven or narrative-driven experience; not one that provided gameplay in the traditional sense, but an experience that would hopefully impact players in a meaningful way. With this in mind, my initial concept was to have the experience center around dialogue, wherein players would assume the role of a friend of the titular "Blockman". The minute-to-minute gameplay would revolve around exploration of the environment to find interactable objects that would unlock new dialogue from Blockman. Through this dialogue, the narrative would tell of the lived experiences of Blockman, and players would come to understand their life through memories. 

Development in-engine began with grayboxing the environment of Blockman's home, where the players would be confined to throughout the experience. This process involved using the ProBuilder Unity package to create basic geometry, and flat textures were applied using the built-in materials. I wanted the environment to feel peaceful, warm and welcoming, like the home itself was a friendly and familiar place to be. In order to achieve this, I utilized the High-Definition Rendering Pipeline (HDRP) to allow for more advanced lighting- including the usage of volumetrics. At the same time, to make Blockman's home feel natural and lived in, I needed recognizable props to populate the playspace. For this, I began creating low-poly models using Maya 2022, and slowly but surely, each of these environmental elements came together to create the world.

After implementing an example interactable object and a dialogue system, v1.0 of the experience was ready to test. Upon presenting the game to an audience, I found that there was positive feedback regarding the environment, but that the methodology behind how I presented the narrative was mixed. Players found it difficult to engage with Blockman on a personal level because of the relationship between them and the player-character, in it that there was no inherent emotional ties. It was suggested to me that, perhaps, Blockman should serve the role as the player-character's father. It would be this feedback that ultimately informed the design direction for the experience.

In order to establish the emotional connection between the player and Blockman that the experience needed, I not only changed the narrative to suggest that Blockman was the player-character's father, but that Blockman was deceased. In doing this, I gave the interactable objects more weight in the narrative, and shifted the context to be the player-character gathering items that their father left behind, inherently adding more emotion to the gameplay.

By choosing to start the experience with the player finding their father dead in the perspective of a memory, I immediately established the context of the gameplay, and gave justification to what the player was doing. This shift in dichotomy overall resonated on a more personal basis with players, and invoked the feelings of both sadness and peacefulness I was trying to elicit. By the end of the project, Blockman & You had succeeded in doing what it set out to, and along the way, I gained helpful knowledge about how to present narrative in games, and how to have narrative invoke desired emotions. I would say that development on Blockman & You was an insightful and helpful experience on how to craft a short, personal experience using very little.

-Documentation-