Initial Mood Board
Thinking, imagining, visualizing! Here are my individual initial ideas for our game, focused on space and environment.
Below is a mood board with a few different preliminary ideas of a dating simulator with ~murder~ attached. There are clear stakes and a lose/win outcome for the player here: either catch the one suitor who is a murderer or get murdered. There are also ideas that come to mind about the afterlife: coming back to mend your broken relationships from the “in-between,” etc.
Setting the Tone
After debriefing with my team, we decided to narrow our focus on the setting of space — we liked where this would take us visually and were inspired by the dramatic genre of the space opera.
With that in mind, I made the following playlist to set the tone:
Reimagining Concepts
After agreeing on the general “space opera” inspiration…
A) Political theme – different outcomes for different plays, all about prioritizing. different nations, different priorities… I like the idea that there are stakes at hand: you have to save your nation in some way by combining powers in another, while hoping to still find love for yourself, if you’re lucky.
B) Functionally vanilla but aesthetically gorgeous dating sim with more visuals than functional difficulty/challenge – more about looking pretty and enjoying looking at the screen, a place you can come to feel calm and think about bubbly love. Maybe even just 1 suitor that you continue to date and build a space life with. Up to you how much you want to invest, but ultimately fulfilling.
C) Twilight / the bachelor final 3: a really low number (2-3) of options that is a true love triangle / love square. can have fun twists where the others fall in love if you aren’t attentive enough, like Webkinz where you come back repeatedly and have to have frequent progress!
D) Piecing together the past – it would be fun if you knew some person you meet in childhood and had to piece together how you used to know them. Thinking Anastasia premise, with multiple endings where you play in chapters and have to find your old home, or build your new one… definitely replayable for emphasizing different values. Inspired by Mystery Dungeon!
Possible Mechanics:
– panning date scene
– progress bar for progress with different suitors
– relationships die if too low?
– montages from past if you have to connect your old connections to your current dating life
