Diving deeper and deeper into our memories
Sonder is an exploratory game with a narrative focus about an adult searching her room for something and sliding deeper and deeper into the past as her surroundings travel throughout time with her .
We created for Ludum Dare 48 and the theme of the game jam was "deeper and deeper"
We created for Ludum Dare 48 and the theme of the game jam was "deeper and deeper"
Below is a video of a full playthrough BUT if it looks AT ALL like your jam I highly reccommend just downloading and playing through it , I think the surprise and gradual reveal of it is the best part !!!!
Members of our team (Hot Clock productions) Mark Lacroix ( Software engineer & technical designer on the project) and Lead Artist Laura Onderwater absolutely made this game a visual feast and This project wouldn't have been nearly as amazing wwithout either of them.
I lead development on Sonder , creating the system of "Time Scenes" which the player travels to and from throughout , building the Audio management system, Creating most of the User Interface code and , the core system of selectable interactive items featuring text descriptions ( as seen above) As well as the click through narrative panel functionality . This is my first point and click game so it was fun to make one finally !
Above was the initial design diagram I was given to work according to and it helped a lot to help me map out basic objects in the space.
I'm a huge fan of showing the work in the process, This was me mapping out basic objects in our first Time Scene environment over one of Lauras early sketches . You could click the objects, the text in red was debug showing which objects would " teleport " you to another time period , and you can see we had a text hover effect which is the visible pink text over the telescope. Which was eventually removed but this was the most rudimentary version of our game .
I'm proud of my audio Manager as well I made it in a little less than an hour but basically a database that holds all of our audio samples , an easy way to assign each clip a unieuq enumerator and that way we could easily change audio cues on he fly Which of course is important in a game jam where time is your biggest enemy.
You can see the corresponding enum on the Selectable token class which matches the enums on our audio manager and with one click we can change where all the audio cues happen in the project !!!!
Each time period / era within our game acts as its own independent scene with different objects which can reveal other objects and certain key objects causing players to leap forward which can affect the final ending the players get . Our designers had a lot of conversations in a little time on how to make this feel familiar and exploratory at the same time . I wrote a mini post-mortem about it here
Been in the industry almost a decade and I still LOVE seeing my name in the credits !
