this week began with handing in a first draft of our project idea to our tutor to let him know the brief outline and scope. so I took some time to think more about my idea, I already knew the type of game I was going to make (visual novel). I am really inspired by other visual novel games, as I am a big fan of the genre, so I knew what kind of direction to go and what I am aiming for for the end product.
I had to mainly think about the back story and inspiration of my game. I decided I wanted to create a psychological thriller story and include a mental health theme with a character with a split personality. I had recently rewatched some favourite movies of mine: black swan, perfect blue and girl interrupted. all these movies focus on female mental health and mental illness, which ended up inspiring me toward the idea that I came up with.
Next I created this mind map of ideas, working off the notes that I showed in the last week post plus my developing horror visual novel concept idea.
following my idea for a mental health theme and split personality character I developed the narrative story. I decided that I wanted the story to follow a character in a high-stress environment that causes a mental break, leading to a split personality. I chose to focus on a medical setting, where the characters
are nurses working at a hospital. I was also led here by the idea of creating nurse character designs, which seemed exciting and a good chance to explore a medical horror theme, which I haven’t done before.
after this, I wrote some further notes about the scope of the project as I was going to dicuss it with my tutor. this is only a rouch idea of the assets that I need to make, but I know that I want create 3 main characters for my game, with one of them having 2 versions as she has the split personality.
I quickly realised that creating a visual novel game from scartch means taking on a lot of work, but this honestly motivated me more as I know the outcome will be so worth it. I will have to create multiple assets: characters, backgrounds, UI, start and end screens, I will also have to use a software to create the game and use coding within that.
I also added a few things that I discussed with my tutor in my notes here, he mentioned that working on expressions and outfits of the characters is very important. he also asked if I was going to include voice acting, which I hadnt really thought of yet, but it seems like a cool possibility – its not time to think about the sound of my game just yet though haha!
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