I Exist

Project INFO

Level-Ups

My Design Process

Narrative/Gameplay Design

With this project, my goal was to use the agency of the players and the visual aesthetic of the game to convey a message while having the player empathize with the main character. I wanted the player to feel that with every action they made he was responsible for the outcome and with every reset learn with their actions and be able to try something new. This concept was very much ingrained in me by watching other games like my personal favorite “Loneliness” and others like “Undertale”.

It’s with that in mind that I decided to have the player relive the same moment over and over and make his choices have grave consequences for the main character. I also decided to have the narrative be told in a more subtle way, using the character animations and visuals and minimal text in world space to try to simulate the situation of the main character reliving the experience that changed their life, making the player have to experience and analyze the same thought process as the main character to get to the end of the game.

Extra Thoughts

I am personally really proud of this project for two reasons. The first one and the most important is because I decided that I wanted to make this game when I saw a very close friend of mine going through extremely harsh moments in their life and all I wanted was to pass them a message, the message that you can see in this project. Being able to make them play this game and watching them cry and thank me was one of the best moments of my life, but that’s not all. As I came back home and started showing this experience to my other childhood friends, I was able to see that many of them were going through the same or similar problems, and to which my game also spoke directly to them. This taught me that no matter how small or how bad your art looks, it will speak to people, people that you never thought would even care for it. It made me finally see something that I had always believed, the power that games have to inspire and communicate with others.

The second one is way less emotional but still relevant to me. Arriving at Digipen I.T, I was barely able to write a single line of code by myself, but in that same year, I taught myself c++, a new engine (Zero Engine) own by the school that had very little documentation, its proprietary coding language and programmed the whole game by myself. This was a big event for me as it showed me that I had the potential to be in this industry and it created in me the mentality of doing what needs to be done to achieve my goals.