Concept Document

CS 247G: Design for Play

Tommy DeBenedetti, Thu Le, Mai Mostafa, Myan Ngo, Candy Tang

Synopsis

While on a camping trip with his family, a boy decides to wander off into the forest and explore. While peering into the hollow of a tree, he loses his balance and falls forward. When he opens his eyes, he realizes that he is now standing in a magical forest and has been transformed into a red fox. Confused and frightened, he ventures deeper into the forest to search for a way to return to his human form and reunite with his family. Along the way, he meets various characters and learns that the forest is sick and losing its magic because of pollution caused by humans. Through a series of quests and puzzles, he gradually helps nurse the forest back to good health and gets closer to finding his way home.

Stories

The greater narrative is told through unordered 3 vignettes, corresponding to different levels which branch off from a central home base in the forest. This period in the forest would be bookended by an opening and concluding segment, but we will elaborate on the “forest stories” because they constitute the gameplay.

Quelling the Fysh Frenzy

A once thriving pond ecosystem was abandoned when, one day, pollutants began to infect the water. The fish, however, who could not flee their only home have since been mutated by the chemical infectants. These mutant fysh have grown legs and lost their minds, and they are rising out of the water to attack other forest creatures. You must defend the forest from these fysh and clean the water to protect the fish from the brainwashing pollution.

Fight back hordes of fysh by eating them from behind before they can slap you with their front flippers. Advance towards the bond by fighting through a series of increasingly big boss fysh.

When you finally reach the pond the last thing between you and the leaky pipeline is a giant — too big, certainly, to eat — koi fysh. Avoid its attacks while you patch up the pipe’s holes and stop the pond’s infection. The koi fish returns to himself, and he and the rest of the surviving fish thank you for your bravery! You return home to enter a serious food coma.

A Salve for the Great Tree

The Great Tree, home to many of the forest’s critters, is sick—a gloomy, sappy blemish is festering and spreading across its trunk. One of its residents, an old but wise and optimistic squirrel has an idea; she knows an elixir that might cure the tree, but she needs your help gathering the ingredients.

A sprig of lily of the valley, for tranquility. In order to find the ingredient, you must enlist your winged friends to create a dense canopy overhead, plunging the forest into darkness and revealing the rare flower’s luminescence.

Honey, for verve. You spy a delighted bear, licking his fingers clean of the sticky substance. He directs you to a lively beehive on a high branch of a nearby tree but warns that if you don’t supply the bees with a source of their favorite snack, pollen, they won’t let you anywhere near their prized possession. You sniff around for a pollen-rich flower and when you sneeze you know you’ve found your target. You pluck it from its stem and make the tricky ascent up the branches to the hive. The bees offer you a chunk of honeycomb right off of their hive!

Spider silk, for durability. Fortunately, spider webs are no rarity this deep in the forest. But, they are so light and thin that you must collect many to harness significant strength. Find spiders around the forest and follow them to their silky homes for harvesting.

Finally, you must find a vessel to store your healing elixir. You scavenge the forest floor for littered shards of glass and piece them back together to make a bottle, which you fill with water from a nearby stream as a base for your potion.

You return to the squirrel and combine all of the ingredients to create a thick iridescent salve, which she slathers on the Great Tree’s sickly chasm. The bark’s strength and color return and the tree’s previously wilting branches perk up gently.

Operation Deforestation

Pollution has added more and more strain to the trees in the enchanted forest, gnawing away at their trunks. A particularly ancient grove of trees is finally exhausted and begins to collapse.

When you get word of the imminent destruction, you rush to the site to try to save the animals who call those trees their home. You quickly scale each tree before it collapses and usher its inhabitants to the forest floor, weaving through panicked tree dwellers and dodging falling acorns.

One resident, however, doesn’t need to be saved — she wants to help with the saving. She is a brave local owl who wants to use her powers of flight to save her friends and neighbors. Work alongside her and with her, taking flight to reach the creatures at the highest branches.

When you and your new friend get all of the animals to the understory, you still are not safe. You herd the residents and, together, outrun the crashing trees. You gather the residents of the forest hub that you have made home and petition them to extend their hospitality to these animals in need. You succeed and find homes for your new neighbors.

Tone

This game is about both the wonder of the natural world and the harm currently being enacted upon it, within the game but also generalized to the broader world around us. We want players to experience the delicate balance between these two truths; the world is beautiful, and unfortunately it is dying. The tone is unique because it must cultivate and accurately show the beauty of nature while acknowledging the somberness of the situation.

Wonder: By specifically depicting a larger than life magical depiction of nature, we want to emphasize wonder and joy of discovery that one can experience within it. This game depicts nature as fantastical, exciting, something to be explored and gain the trust of. The environment is not just where the story takes place, it is alive around you. You must engage with it, speak with the creatures, help revitalize it, but never try to change it. It is in the exploration and restoration of its natural beauty that the user will experience a sense of wonder.

Jubilant: Jubilant is defined as an exceeding happiness and triumph, however I would argue that we reimagine this word to mean an exceeding happiness and belief in one’s own triumph. Regardless of the reality of the situation, we want the environment, the creatures, to still feel hope for their situation. The gameplay should feel joyful — not heavy. They are allowed to experience complex emotions, however we want to emphasize that there is, in a sense, an unshakeable will that is held together through their shared happiness. It is their jubilance which gives them hope for a better future and encourages the player to do so as well.

Inspiring: It is through this jubilance that what we really want is to inspire the player. We can depict and show the negative impacts on the environment, but we also do not want the player to feel as though they are in a hopeless situation. Any depiction of harm being done to the environment can and should balance the tone such that the user feels the pain of the world around them, but also feels its hope for more, and as such is inclined to chase it. The moral of this story is not that the forest, or our world, is dying. That is more the backdrop, the context which the forest’s creatures and we know all too well at this point. The moral is that we can save it — with hope, and collaboration, and determination. The game does not harp on the suffering of the forest but focuses on the solution; furthermore, putting the player in the driver’s seat in that solution inspires hope and a sense of agency.

The Setting

The game takes place in a magical forest underneath a tree that a little child falls into after running away from home. Once the little child falls, they become an animal and traverse the underground world as a red fox.

We intend to structure the “levels” or areas of the map such that they all must be explored for the player to be presented with the option to go back home if they so choose. There is some sort of central hub that is unlocked after the introductory level, that allows the player to explore all other le

vels and gain knowledge of the world as they see fit. This provides the structure for them to explore and understand the narrative at their own pace, with more agency that ideally will contribute to more fun.

In terms of visual design, we have been thinking about perhaps making it so that the areas are monochromatically themed, with creatures, scenery, and music that correlates with each area’s assigned color. However we have also been playing with other ideas that correlate to seasons, specific things harming each environment, or biomes. This is all still up in the air, however we really want the visual design to evoke a sense of magic and excitement within the player.

Gameplay

Our gameplay is centered around exploration of the magical forest and its three settings. Gameplay varies level to level with various objectives, such as scavenging, action-intense combat, puzzle solving, etc.

Main navigation controls will include WASD or arrow keys for movement in the cardinal directions. These character controls are characteristic of 2D ‘Top Down’ games ’, which allow for a larger plane of movement compared to traditional 2D linear platform games.

Other mechanics will include:

Limited vision in the night, occluding vision outside of a central radius around the player
Addition of external lighting, such as fireflies, glow-in-the-dark flowers, fire, moonlight
An action key, like spacebar, for a variety of actions based on context
- Climb up mountains
- Pick-up items
- Fighting action, like tackle or bite
- Talk for dialogue
- Hold breath underwater
- Interact with environment
Mouse movement and clicks to piece together certain puzzles

We plan to include UI elements such as a highlight upon hovering to show interactable elements within the environment. For example, there may be a bush that is highlighted when you walk past, indicating that a player can press the action key (spacebar) to uncover an item hidden under the brush. This allows for more obvious action and movement in the game, all the while introducing a mystery component to the game that forces players to question their environment and explore it thoroughly. In doing so, the setting becomes an interactable character, rather than a background. This additionally adds to the theme that the forest is a living thing and reinforces the sacredness of nature.

Tone References

We all brought a variety of influences and inspiration as we began ideating through this. In general, we picked media that evoke the sense of wonder we want our player to experience, but also things that explain the narrative of harm against nature quite well. A balance of somberness and hope is something we also thought about and found admirable in many of these references.

Games

- Animal Crossing: New Horizons
- Undertale
- Hollow Knight
- Ori and the Blind Forest

Movies

- Bridge to Terabithia
- Tinkerbell
- Alice in Wonderland
- Howl’s Moving Castle
- The Secret World of Arrietty

TV Shows

- Over the Garden Wall

Books

- Warriors
- Magic Treehouse
- The Lorax

Key Challenges for Design

Balancing Serious Messages and Fun. Our game aims to create awareness surrounding climate change meaningfully, but without making the game feel overly grim. Designing mechanics that communicate ecological impact through the gameplay (e.g. trees dying in the magical forest, fish going crazy due to water pollution) while allowing the player to just have fun is tricky.

Building a Living, Dying World. We want the magical forest to feel alive, yet deteriorating over time. Designing ecosystems that react dynamically (e.g. plants withering, animals migrating, rivers drying up) and giving the player ways to reverse or influence that without becoming overwhelming or unclear is a major challenge.

Designing Transformative Progression. Since the player will turn from a boy into a fox, we’ll need to think about how their identity and emotional storytelling evolves. How can we represent their journey (both physical and internal) in a way that’s engaging but also reflects his growing connection to the forest?

Key Challenges for Tech

Efficient Scene Management. Our forest will be large with multiple distinct biomes and regions that will all change based on pollution levels. So, we’ll need a loading and streaming system to manage performance while allowing seamless transitions as the player explores.

Dialogue and Narrative Branching. A rich, character-driven story will likely require a dialogue system with branching paths, memory (i.e. characters remembering you), and possibly multiple endings. This would be very technically complex, especially if we want to change the character dialogue/mood based on the status of the forest (i.e. sad when the forest dies versus happy when the forest is healthy).

Unity Learning Curve. Two out of our team of five have no Unity experience, and the remaining three have recently started using Unity. Dealing with Unity’s learning curve will be a challenge.

Key Challenges for Art

Art style must balance being aesthetically pleasing but also within technical limits. While we have a lot of ideas about the storyline and overall aesthetic of the game, we only have about four weeks to produce a slice of this game. Thus, we need to find an art style that is aesthetically pleasing, but also simple enough to create with the limited time frame. We’re confident that we can find a simple art style or maybe even a minimalistic art style that is both beautiful and practical.

Art must reflect jubilant but also more serious themes. Our story starts light-hearted in the beginning, with a very archetypal plotline of a transformation of a boy into an animal. While players explore nature, we also want to juxtapose the beauty of nature with its destruction from human efforts, to better bring awareness to these topics and add complexity to the conflict. We need the art to be flexible so that it can reflect both sides of this, without changing dramatically to the point that the transition is too harsh and noticeable. Small, subtle changes in the art style can slowly bring attention to darker themes that reflect the gradual degradation of nature in real life. This flexibility will allow for a more unified, cohesive branding that minimizes the amount of artwork we have to do. Ideally, the art can be darkened a little bit and the addition or removal of tiny details to communicate desecrated areas in the forest.

Art requires a degree of complexity to introduce mystery and incentivize interaction. Our game hinges on discovery, exploration, and mystery to be interesting. Game elements and plot points must be somewhat noticeable, but not too noticeable to ensure that the player can thoroughly explore interactable and non-interactable elements. To do so, there must be a tasteful amount of visual clutter to obscure objectives in an aesthetically pleasing manner. This can take form with a lot of foliage and fauna, non-relevant moving animals, and small animations that bring the scenery to life.

Our art should have fluidity in movement and expression of texture to bring the forest to life. The movement of the character should be fluid and smooth for more tangible controls. Perhaps the movement animation has more frames to make it smoother. Maybe the fox’s steps or tail swishes should be responsive to any small movement to accentuate player control. Forest elements should have animated parts to bring it to life. While it is a 2D game with limited time in development, it needs to have an appropriate amount of animation frames such that the game is not perceived as blocky or poorly-animated. Our art must be animated with vigor and liveliness to bring the magical fantasy to life.

Who is this for?

We hope to create a dynamic where the player is encouraged to wander and interact with the world, which would appeal to gamers who enjoy experiencing exploration and submission/abnegation. In addition, as the narrative is a crucial part of our game, we hope to attract players who are drawn to emotionally rich, story-driven experiences that unfold through discovery and interaction, specifically those who are interested in environmental issues. We plan to limit our puzzles’ difficulty and provide optional hints, so our game should be accessible to a wide audience!