Break Down Studio

Break Down team members:

Sasha- Director

Archie- UI Designer

Rosie- Script Writer

Sean- Research Lead

Amare- 2D lead

Atticuse- Environment Lead

What is a visual novel in the games industry? 

The official definition for a visual novel means ‘a genre of video games in which stories are told through a textual narrative with static or animated illustrations and a varying degree of interactivity’ (English Dictionary 02/02/2024) These works of fiction make use of various imagery, sound and written dialog as well as the use of player multiple choice to communicate to the consumer a story. These games can be utilised for multiple purposes such as education, awareness or just general entertainment. 

What inspirations did we study? 

While creating plans for this game, we studied a few different pre-existing games to pull inspo from! We knew we wanted our project to have an underlying theme of psychological horror (Psychological horror focuses on the mental, emotional, and psychological states of a human being, often deconstructing their situations to frighten, disturb, or unsettle the audience- nofilmschool 17/09/2024) and investigated corpse party to generate some possibilities for our own project. Corpse Party features a variety of characters stuck in a sinister school trying to figure out together how to escape alive. Each of them has their own personality and traits and the torment of the school mentally breaks each of them in different ways. This concept we felt we could use in reverse by creating a bunch of mentally suffering and declining characters with the objective of trying to aid these people and provide help.  We also looked at various games to help us create an art identity for our game. Something we liked was the stylistic usage of different colours and textures for blood within certain games to allow for the material to meet age restrictions. Some examples of games we looked at that do this are the ‘Danganronpa’ game series as well as a visual novel game called ‘Purrfect Apawcalypse.’ Both games use blood colours such as Pink and Green to make their game appropriate for their audiences and to help with their respective identities. These aspects help to make a game distinguishable. In terms of gameplay and mechanics, we studied a game called ‘That’s not my neighbour’ where you play as a doorman letting people into the building they live in. You play from a first-person perspective looking through a window to the character. Your perspective also features a desk covered with objects and files to help you progress the game. The person attempting to enter the building hands you all their details and it is your job to use all your files and functions to ensure what the character is telling you matches up with reality to ensure you make the right decision on letting the character into the building or not. We thought that parts of this game, particularly the POV and the idea that the characters come to you instead of traversing multiple environments was an interesting concept that would work well with the rest of the inspirations we had taken from other games. 

What is the plan for our project? 

When brain-storming ideas for our game, we knew we wanted to touch into as many mental health possibilities possible to touch on as many real-world issues as we can instead of focusing our ideas on just one issue with one target audience. We didn’t want this to get confusing, so we decided to set our game in a direction where the player themselves is the main character. This way, instead of having to worry about keeping track of loads of characters interactions and relationships with each other, the player only needs to worry about characters interacting with them. Our game is called disconnected and features a similar structure to ‘That’s not my neighbour’ which we looked at previously. Our concept is to have the player be working as an online therapist hosting one way video calls with clients where they can see and hear the client but can only reply through a text chat. You will play from the POV of looking at a computer screen. The objective is to host your therapy session with your client and do your best to help them work through and understand their problems helping them identify the issue and how to help themselves. Your primary objective is to successfully help all the clients however, mental illness can be an uncomfortable topic, and each has their own respective dark truths. If the player makes the wrong moves and says the wrong things, their appointment can go south very quickly. If the player messes up, they can make the clients state even worse causing them to react in an intense manor and deteriorate. If the player fails, the appointment will disconnect, and the therapist will lose sanity. The lower your personal sanity, the harder the next appointments will become. Throughout the game, there will be various ways to regain or lose more sanity such as going to sleep, minigames through popups, phone calls and more. There will be multiple endings depending on how many and which characters you are able to help as well as your sanity bar. 

How does our concept fit into the brief? 

The brief states that our game’s purpose should be to appeal and educate an audience of youths to show them the significance of mental health and break the stigma that keeping quiet about issues is easier to deal with alone. Our objective is to show a younger audience that mental health is important and to be taken seriously. To reach as mang people as possible with our game, we aren’t focusing on one single mental health topic and instead are choosing to showcase a variety of characters who all have their own respective struggles. Through our dialog options, our game will show our audiences the best approaches when trying to help somebody who is struggling find the help that they need. It will also help people identify when people are struggling and the line between what is and isn’t becoming a problem. We also aim to show the reality of these mental health conditions and to showcase how letting things fester and get worse, can lead to a far dire situation. 

Bibliography

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Anon, Purrfect apawcalypse: Love at Furst bite on steam [online]. Steampowered.com. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1532510/Purrfect_Apawcalypse_Love_at_Furst_Bite/ [Accessed 20 October 2024 b].

Anon, Steam search [online]. Steampowered.com. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=danganronpa [Accessed 20 October 2024 c].

Anon, SteamPeek - Indie friendly game discovery [online]. Steampeek.hu. Available at: https://steampeek.hu/ [Accessed 20 October 2024 d].

Anon, That’s not my Neighbor Wiki [online]. Fandom.com. Available at: https://thats-not-my-neighbor.fandom.com/wiki/That%27s_not_my_Neighbor_Wiki [Accessed 20 October 2024 e].

Anon, Collinsdictionary.com. Available at: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/psychological-horror [Accessed 20 October 2024 f].

Hellerman, J., 2024. Defining the psychological horror genre [online]. No Film School. Available at: https://nofilmschool.com/psychological-horror [Accessed 20 October 2024].