This game is basically a culmination of what I have worked on for the past few years and while it is really short, I am really proud of the product. Essentially, Familiar is an adventure game where you explore an old forest as a fox, reliving a memory of a former friend. The story isn't too complex but I wanted to tell it in a difficult way. There's no voice lines or text (aside from tooltips) and the story is told in vignettes - small scenes from the past that showcase the bird and fox's friendship.

This game was made for my Game Design course, which mean I did have a time limit for creating it. Overall, I had around three weeks to design the game from scratch. The only thing I did not create myself were the models and ground textures, along with the music. Still, juggling this project between my other coursework helped teach me great time management for game design! I also worked with a partner who I shout out on the itch page. They helped a lot with setting up the animations and water layers, along with giving valuable input.

There are quite a number of things I worked on during this project that I would love to go in depth with, but I do not want to bore you with my rambling.

The game I had in mind was much more grand than the final product, as of what generally comes from indie games. Starting from the beginning though, my main idea was to make a story about a fox and a bird. A story that wouldn't be told linearly and wouldn't be told traditionally. I am a huge fan of exploring open worlds and finding aspects of environmental story telling throughout, so I wanted to create something like that. The first cut feature I had it in mind that the fox would accumulate powers as they traversed throughout the open terrain, allowing them to get to places they weren't able to get to before. It would allow for a sense of progression throughout the game while giving the player an accumulating amount of agency. Ultimately though it was super hard to develop an environment that supported this and supported a non-linear way to explore it. In the interest of time, I had cut the feature.

This mean I had to design my environment with the idea that traversal will be constant throughout - which isn't that hard to do. The first thing I planned is where the major vignettes were going to be and the environments surrounding them. From a design perspective, I didn't want them to be too close in where the player doesn't have to explore a lot of the world but I also didn't want them too far so the player would have a lot of empty time while exploring between the locations. The idea I ended up with is that I could make sort of a circular shape - one vignette somewhat in the center with the rest being along the edges. It ended up looking somewhat like this:

This circle shape made it possible for me to put smaller vignettes (represented in blue) between locations and have the player not feel empty while heading to the next main vignette. Furthermore, it encouraged the non-linearity aspect I was going for as the player wasn't bound to one path but could make multiple paths.

The final thing I wanted but ultimately didn't end up finishing was a cave system underneath. I had trouble thinking of how to properly design the caves in a way that players wouldn't get bored while also not having to do an insane amount of extra work due to my time constraints.

One of the hardest things to was thinking about how to exactly encourage the player to explore. After looking at examples of other games similar to what I'm looking for, like Breath of the Wild, I found the answer to be pretty simple. All I needed to do was show the player whats out there!

Achieving this was a bit more difficult than having a camera pan across the map, so I added a second mode to the fox. When pressing a key, the fox would be transported what is kind of like a past world. Old objects may be in different spots, cut-down trees may be standing tall, among many other things! The main notable characteristics of this world is that everything is tinted in a blue hue and past objects are in a blue transparent material. The main vignettes in this world would produce a large smoke flare so the player could see it easily at any time. Smaller vignettes also produce a miniature flare.

This was all well and good, but I also need the story to be understandable. As I mentioned before, the story is pretty simple, but the way I'm telling the story is difficult. There are really three essential parts to the story: the fox and the bird meet, they play and have fun together and become friends, and then the bird migrates south for the winter. The beginning and end have to be in those spots, but I realized I could tell the way the bird and fox became friends in any order. It didn't matter if they played in the water first or played fetch, the story will still be legible to the reader. It would matter however if the bird left and then the fox and the bird played fetch - that'd make no sense!

What I am getting at here is that I needed the end to not be open at the start. To do this, I made the decision to have it unlock after you go through four of the seven vignettes. Going to this final destination would give you a scene of the bird migrating south before ending the game. This allowed me to make a clear story while telling it non-linearly.

Overall, I learned a few important key things while working on this project. One of the most important ones was how to manage my development time! But I did learn a lot about staging and designing non-linear stories. I definitely feel like I achieved my main goal and I am super happy with how I did.