Echos of Home
Team Niglarodon:
Vivian RU, Yunming HUANG, Yan CHEN, Lebriz Bal CLAYTON
Artist’s Statement:
“Echoes of Home” explores a simple yet deeply personal question: what is it that makes a place feel like “home”?
Rather than relying on lengthy dialogue or cinematic cutscenes to tell the story, we want players to discover the answer for themselves through exploration and everyday interactions. Players take on the role of a stray dog returning to a town that was once familiar. By helping old neighbors, recovering lost memories, and piecing together clues found in the environment, players gradually uncover the town’s secrets while simultaneously reconstructing the protagonist’s own past.
At the heart of our design is the belief that emotional resonance should stem from interaction rather than mere storytelling. We do not explicitly define “home” for the player; instead, we invite them to rebuild that sense of belonging through their own acts of exploration, kindness, and recollection. We aim for every game mechanic to enrich this emotional journey: completing tasks deepens friendships with townsfolk, gathering clues encourages close observation of the surroundings, and recovering memories restores the player’s sense of connection. In this way, narrative and gameplay are seamlessly integrated, as the story emerges naturally from the player’s actions.
Our design intentionally emphasizes kindness over conflict. There are no enemies, combat systems, or time limits; instead, progression is driven by curiosity, empathy, and meaningful interactions with the world. The town is designed to be compact, encouraging players to revisit familiar locations as they unlock new conversations and memories. Revisiting these places with a fresh perspective mirrors the way we often see familiar spaces in a new light as our memories and understanding evolve.
Ultimately, “Echoes of Home” is more than just a puzzle game; it is an experience centered on exploring the world and forging connections with that world and with memories. We hope that upon finishing the game, players will not only have solved the mysteries but also gained a profound realization: home is not merely a physical location, but a collection of the relationships and cherished memories that stay with us always.
Before you play, please watch this video:
Play:
https://allesgutevivian.itch.io/echos-of-home
GitHub:
https://github.com/allesgutevivian/p2-echos-of-home
System Map:
Initial decisions about formal elements and values of our game:
We initially wanted our game to be a relaxing type of game in which the user plays and learns about the game through discovery of the map that is created. This means that the player would win the game/finish the game through interactions with NPC’s. Therefore we wanted our storytelling method to be heavily environmental which meant that we wanted to focus on the aesthetics of the game in order to keep the player interested even if the game isn’t action and combat heavy.
The main values of our game are comfort, curiosity and emotional connection. We wanted the game to be played by a wide range of people meaning that the mechanics are relatively easy. The visual style would use warm colours, friendly character designs to create a comforting and homely atmosphere. At the same time, the mystery of the missing owner gives the player a clear reason to continue exploring to keep the player invested.
Scope of the game:
The game we present is a slice.
Testing and iteration history:
The initial brainstorm of this game is that we want players to be able to freely explore through a small town, meet people, complete everyday quests, and slowly recover the memories that connect Milo to his past. We wanted the game to feel comfortable and curious rather than tense and heavy, with the story gradually emerging from the world itself. This meant that much of our design had to be discovered through testing, because the experience we imagined as designers was not always the experience players had.
Iteration 0 | Playtest 1: Analogue Prototype, Finding the Core
We started with a very simple analogue prototype. The map only contained the clinic and the beach, and the main characters included Conner and Santiago. The purpose was simple: before worrying about implementation, we wanted to see whether the basic structure of the mechanics of exploring a map, meeting NPCs, and completing small tasks could support the larger mystery.
Working this way was useful because it let us test the game with very little loss. We could simply change the map, characters, or interactions immediately instead of becoming attached to an implementation that had not yet been tested.
After the playtest, we discovered that the basic structure worked, but some of the tasks felt too easy in the analogue version. More importantly, the experience did not yet feel like the kind of exploration game we wanted. We began thinking about how perspective could make the world feel more natural to move through. After considering that a first-person point of view may limit the vision of examining around, we settled on a limited third-person point of view, partly inspired by Stardew Valley, because it gives a better balance between seeing the environment, noticing NPCs, and maintaining the warm, small-scale feeling of the town.
Iteration 1 | Digital Prototype
Once the basic structure felt promising, we made a big push into digital development. The game engine we use is Unity, and after further research, we decided to use web coding to create the game in Unity. Our goal was to build enough of the game to test the actual interaction loop rather than continue discussing it only in theory.
We come up with the basic mechanics, such as moving through the map, talking to NPCs, completing quests, and searching for clues and memories. There were still many bugs, but the prototype was the first moment when the game began to feel like a real game rather than a plan for one.
This was also when the course ideas around formal elements of games became more meaningful to us. The map, rules, player actions, NPC interactions, and progression were no longer separate ideas on paper. They are working together, and that is also when we notice that even problems in one part could affect the whole experience.
Iteration 2 | Playtest 2: Players Were Playing, But Were They Understanding?
The second playtest revealed a problem that was much bigger than any individual bug. Our player could interact with the game, but she did not understand what the game was really asking her to do.
The most important feedback pointed towards the question, ‘What is this game actually about?’ Our player also had little background information, did not know how to interact, and was unsure why completing a quest mattered. There was also no clear reward for doing so.
For us, the experience was a valuable lesson in playing critically as game designers. We knew the whole story already, so many things felt obvious when we watched players. But that knowledge was exactly the problem. We were seeing the game through the eyes of its creators instead of through the eyes of someone encountering it for the first time.
We also discovered that visual design could quietly break an otherwise functional system. Some text was nearly invisible because of its colour, making important conversations and clues difficult to see and follow. This also makes us realise that visual hierarchy is not simply about making a game look good; it determines what players notice and what they understand.
Changes
We added a short background introduction so that players could understand the situation before entering the town. We intentionally kept it to a paragraph instead of creating a long exposition sequence.
We also reconsidered how quests should function. Our quests were supposed to be the small puzzles that gradually unlocked memories, but players did not always see that connection. We therefore began making the quests connect more closely to the narrative structure rather than being isolated tasks that serve as an obstacle.
Iteration 3 | Playtest 3: When the Mystery Works
The third playtest gave us one of the most encouraging moments in the project. A player independently began to suspect that Steve was Milo’s formal owner.
That moment mattered because it was exactly the kind of reaction we had hoped to create. The player was not being given the answer; she was forming an answer from the information she had collected. For a game built around memories and discovery, that felt like proof that the central mystery could actually work.
At the same time, we noticed that the player could still miss quest notifications. The game was becoming better at generating curiosity, but the information supporting that curiosity was not always visible enough.
Changes
We designed a quest board that players could check whenever they needed. Rather than keeping objectives constantly on screen, we wanted to give players another place where they can recheck when they feel uncertain.
This was a small change, but it reflected a larger principle we had learned through testing: support the player without taking away their freedom. This was especially important for our game because free exploration itself was intended to be part of the fun. The town is supposed to invite curiosity, with NPCs and locations gradually revealing different parts of Milo’s past and the hidden truth about the car accident.
Iteration 4 | Playtest 4: The Gap Between Us and the Player
Playtest 4 was probably our most important test because it forced us to confront the difference between what we thought the player would feel and what the player actually felt.
The biggest issue was that the player was still guessing too much. He was unsure where to go, which areas were accessible, and what he was supposed to do next. At the same time, several smaller issues became very visible: dialogue text could disappear against the background, the scene needed to be rescaled, and the square representing the characters felt distracting.
Individually, these problems seemed small. Together, they created friction everywhere. A player could understand the story in principle but still struggle to experience it because the level was not communicating clearly enough.
Rather than treating each comment as an isolated problem, we started looking for the design issue underneath them. The common problem was not simply “players need more instructions”. It was that the game was making important information harder to access than it needed to be. Our intended fun was based heavily on exploration, curiosity, and emotional discovery, and this confusing navigation and unreadable dialogue were not productive forms of these challenges that create the fun. They were getting in the way of the kind of fun we actually wanted.
Changes
We made a much larger push after this playtest.
To increase the accessibility of important information at the beginning, we added a short opening video introducing the background, objective, and basic tutorial information. The character’s figure is implemented into the game. A black background is also added behind dialogue so that important text can be read clearly, and there’s also a hint at the bottom of the page when the player is close to a house that is interactable.
Unnecessary polygons were removed when exporting the game to the website so that the environment would feel cleaner and easier to read. We also fixed the major interaction bugs we had identified, including the Santiago fish quest issue.
These changes were not about making the game more complicated. In fact, they were about removing unnecessary difficulty so that the intended difficulty, the process of discovering Milo’s story, could become more visible.
Demonstration of experience:
