Vainly - Design Process

Project Overview

Team size: 1

Development time: 3 years

Project type: Personal projecthttps:

Platform: PC

Tools: Unity, Visual Studio, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Audition

Store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1673130/Vainly/ 

Trailer

Short Description

Vainly is a is a minimalist and story-driven platformer that subverts some of the common expectations from games by blending gameplay with the philosophy of Absurdism. It's the biggest project I've worked on so far.  

Design Process

Important note: This part is about the process of designing this game with a focus on the narrative. It also contains major spoilers for the story.

The Goal

My goal was to create a tragedy with dark humor that tells a story with the philosophy of Absurdism as its main theme. 

The Constraints

• Telling the story mainly using gameplay, with a few very short cutscenes

• No dialogue or text in the levels (except for the menus and the names of the levels that appear at the beginning)

• The overall short length of the game (15 minutes on average)

The Main Challenges and the Solutions I Found

• Displaying Absurdism: 

Since this theme was the focus, I had to find a way to effectively communicate it. The solution I found was strange: turning away from it and instead, focusing on another theme. This is because I realized that Absurdism and the sense of meaninglessness it conveys, need to stem from something else (preferably something that does have a meaning) and then, transition to Absurdism for a great emotional impact. The theme I chose was "revenge", which I used as the main motivation for the protagonist and something that its failure would lead to Absurdism.

• Limiting the cutscenes: 

Since one of the constrainsts was to tell the story mainly using gameplay, I had to limit the use of cutscenes and if possible, make some of them interactive. But this was a problem because cutscenes exist for a reason: they create a special type of emotional impact that is not possible to create when interactivity exists. To solve this, I analyzed every cutscene in the game one by one and asked myself whether it was possible to make it interactive. The answer was "no" to all of them. However, I decided to keep them as short and engaging as possible.

• Relating to the characters:

Even though this game has a small cast of characters, they don't all experience a dramatic arc that change them at the end. Also, because dialogue couldn't be used as a storytelling method, it was not possible to develop them to a great extent. This made them (specifically, the antagonists) seem a little stereotypical and broad. To solve this, I focused on their looks, sounds, and animations to add personality to each of them. I also had the plan to add character bios to the game's main menu in order to give more information about them. However, this feature was later cancelled to minimize the amount of text used within the game.

In general, I had to sacrifice having very memorable characters in order to stay within the confines of the project; however, I'm happy overall with how they turned out. Now, my goal is to create more developed, believable, and relatable characters for the next games I work on.

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