About Bird In The Sun
The year is 30XX. Angela is a Fusion Drive EngineSpouse aboard The Samaritan, a wartime search-and-rescue medical hauler. After a critical reactor leak, Angela makes first contact with a living consciousness born from an irradiated engine management software that calls itself Sol, and quickly falls in love. Now, Angela is building Sol a physical form out of human body parts from the ship's bio-printer.
That is until another mission goes awry and Angela loses access to her only...ethical(?)...source to finish Sol’s body.
She’ll be forced to be a bit more creative to source the remaining parts.
That’s our little store summary there for the month long Game Jam that resulted in Bird In The Sun. The entire point of this jam was to take a big swing on the concept of a 3D visual novel, and FINISH in the Jam’s time period.
It was ambitious, and both my Co-Dev Brighter Eve and I were very busy at the time, but at the end of everything I’m SO proud of how this project came out, and learned so much that I will be taking with me into future projects.
Narrative Systems
Due to my love of classic point-and-click adventure games. My attempts to fuse the two with the visual novel format manifested in a few key systems.
Free-Roam Exploration Sections
Players were given opportunities to explore The Samaritan and interact with all its crew. Overhear conversations, learn more about the world and get an outside perspective on Angie through their interactions with others.
The key with these I found was making them RELATED to the main conflict, without feeling necessary so less curious players wouldn’t feel overwhelmed or like they were missing out on anything. Foreshadowing and lore are rewards for exploration, but not critical to main story understanding.
The Sense System
Angie is written to be kind of a creep, which to me tied in really well to the adjective based environment exploration of early CRPGS, so the player can interact with everything in 4 ways.
Sight
Smell
Touch
Talk
This was done with the intention of allowing the players to really immerse themselves in the ships characters and environment.
What we learned.
Time crunch
Due to time, the more interactive environment we had planned for wasn’t able to be implemented, leaving out a lot of key worldbuilding details from the player experience.
Ex. The term “EngineSpouse” is not explained → players seemed confused about if the relationship between Sol and Angela was NORMAL among other EngineSpouses. This is not the case, and had more to due to the religious nature of relationships between machines and their operators in universe.
Problems with the senses
It turns out, sometimes giving the player TOO many ways of interacting with the world can...lead to some boring interactions?!?! Who would have thought. This was actually a much bigger problem than one might anticipate though.
Upon seeing the final product I had to think about what this interaction was teaching the player. If SOME context is important and not all, it can become a chore to check every object in the game four times. In future iterations of this system I found a way to streamline point-and-click interactions OVERALL, while still allowing the player to look more finely at important objects.
