Sento with Baachan (P2 Map, Premise, Plan: Yuina)

Premise

You’re back home from college, and you want to spend some good, peaceful moments with baachan, your grandma, before you leave again. It’s been a while since you’ve been home, and you feel a little guilty, so tonight you take baachan to her favorite sento, a Japanese bathhouse. As you revisit the past together, baachan’s memory drifts in and out like the steam around you, and some things might be forgotten, rewritten, or re-remembered. In Sento with Baachan, you have to decide whether forgetting is a mercy, or whether the truth is worth the pain – choosing whether to correct her or play along, and deciding when to get out of the bath before the steam and heat become too much to bear.

Map

Here’s my map as of now, with the key timeline: P2 map

To set up, pink Post-it notes are baachan‘s dialogue; grey is the player’s. As the story progresses, the amount of “steam” visual in the scene becomes important in symbolizing how “hazy” baachan‘s memory is. This is the basic bone-structure of the plan so far.

We first start with context-building:

And include some hints of baachan‘s memory drifting in and out. This is where the player would first notice more steam in the scene.

The final arc of the game is intended to be more shocking to the player — do we remind baachan that her husband passed away last year?

And the ending consists of getting out of the bath, one way or another — it’s too hot and steamy in the scene to stay.

Plan

My plan is to start early with tinkering on Ren’Py, because I don’t know what technical challenges I might face. I will de-prioritize the UI polishing until later, so that I can get the branching/story down pat first.