HER VOICE (PAGE IS WIP)
Built in the Unity Engine
Team Project
My Roles: Writing, Narrative Design, Programming, Sound Design, Music
Design Intent
Her Voice is a visual novel with a unique gameplay loop developed for an assignment in a Narrative Design class during my first year at Sheridan College. I was given a semester (14 weeks) to work on a game with little restrictions from the assignment brief. The only requirement was that it had to tell some sort of story and has branching story paths.
Unlike most visual novels, this game has a different system that involves OBSERVATIONS, THOUGHTS, and ACTION. OBSERVATIONS will spawn describing what she sees, smells, feels, hears, and what she taste. OBERSVATIONS can then be produced into a THOUGHT, here we see what the main character thinks about what’s happening around her. Then optionally, she can act or speak upon her THOUGHTS. This is always a choice to players, thus causing branching story paths dependent on what they choose to act on.
I decided to make my game in the Unity Engine as I could program the game’s main gameplay loop in it, something I couldn’t do in other visual novel engines such as Twine, Ren’Py or other engines.
Story Synopsis
A young girl diagnosed with throat cancer has dreams of becoming a singer when she grows up. Watch her as she deals with personal struggles, medical issues, and most importantly, watch her build relationships with those around her through tough times.
Her life may be imperfect, but imperfection is what makes things pretty.
Scroll down for Screenshots & Process
Process
Preplanning Stage
When planning out the game, I first came up with the game’s central gameplay loop. The main constraint I put on myself when starting this project was that I didn’t want a lot of art assets to cut out on development time. Since visuals was put on a backburner, I needed the other elements of the game (such as writing, gameplay, and sound) to be as strong as possible.
I sketched out a basic loop of how gameplay would work.
Initial Sketch of how the game loop functions