Game Trailer
The game Sehnsucht was built as part of my Master’s thesis and sought to understand how video games can emphatically communicate personal emotion to players and create emotional connections through experiential gameplay. The thesis looked at several vital theories relating to emotion in video games and explored concepts such as emotioneering, emotional storytelling, mise-en-scène, interactivity, presence and immersion, the space of possibility, core mechanics, and poetic gameplay. The emotion that the project focuses on is personal nostalgia surrounding a childhood home of mine.
The indescribable emotion surrounding a childhood home is something most adults have felt at some point in their lives. My exact emotions concerning this house and its loss are encompassed in a word I know as Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht (pronounced sane-zookt) is a German noun translated as “craving” or “yearning”, or in the broader sense, a type of “intensely missing”.
The game takes the form of an immersive adventure that allows players to traverse personal memories of my grandparent’s house and glean information through intuitive exploration. Different rooms can be explored to solve puzzles and find objects linked to nostalgia, childhood, and memory. Several games were researched, and some of the design considerations included the aesthetics, interface design, mechanics, player character design, modularity, and structure of the virtual space. Emphasis was placed on accurately recreating the house with importance to textures and modeling while enhancing the narrative and player engagement. The software used was Maya, Adobe Substance Painter, Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator, Procreate for the Ipad Pro, and Unreal Engine 4.26.
Quick video walkthrough of entire game
Game environment render
The house was assembled in UE 2.46 using the 3D models built in Maya, based on architectural blueprints, and forms the primary environment for the game. The actual house was around 70 years old and did not follow most of the standard dimensions regarding walls, windows, and doors. None of the walls were modular, so these had to be measured and created as separate elements. Prominent features such as the slanting roof, mismatched windows, and different doors were crucial to capture the house’s character.
To emulate the lived-in and cluttered nature of the house, many 3D models were required. These were also created to match the contents and layout of the original house. This included furniture, structural elements such as doors and windows, and items such as books, plates, cups, etc. These were all made to scale by referencing standard measurements so that there was visual cohesion throughout. Finally, special attention was paid to modeling the main objects of interest in the game, which were used as the primary narrative devices.
Images of the original house versus the game environment are shown below, along with some images of the models being developed in Maya.
Much attention was paid to having high-quality textures throughout the game. Textures were made using Adobe Substance Painter and exported as texture maps using personal photographs as references. In some cases, creative commons images and textures were built upon and used. Other textures were created from scratch in Procreate for the iPad Pro, Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator. It was important to me to add as much personal touch as possible, and small clues such as engravings of initials and specific book covers were used to add authenticity and hidden meaning. This personal approach and focus on texturing are intended to enrich the space visually and metaphorically.
The game followed the typical mechanics of a third-person RPG, with a childlike perspective in mind. The idea behind the character was developed as a wisp that represents a sliver of thought that is traversing the memories of the house. As a non-corporeal wisp, there was potential for the character to navigate the space in all three dimensions. This navigation method is an efficient way to explore the scene’s entirety as a scaled-down character. Particle systems were used to create the player character and points of interest.
The main mechanic was identified initially, and it involves picking up objects that help with the story’s narration as an exploratory game. A pyramid method of building the mechanics was employed in the design, with the mechanics getting relatively more complicated as the player explores subsequent rooms. For example, the player needs to find objects in the correct order, read maps, or interact with multiple objects. In addition to the primary mechanic, significant attention was placed on creating puzzles and interactions throughout the game, using Unreal’s blueprint system.
2D elements such as illustrations and overlaid text were designed to form a part of the narrative structure. An entire script was planned and written out. The game’s focus is on the environment, so these had to be designed not to detract but add to player immersion. Therefore, the visual style of these elements is clean and straightforward. The illustrations are used to tell facets of the story as snapshots of memory. A faded watercolor illustration style was finalized to emulate 'Paint by numbers' puzzles from childhood. Each illustration was designed to look cohesive, and specific colours were used to denominate the different memories and people linked to them
The logo was used in the design of the User Interface. The main menu, controls page, pause menu and ending page were created using the widget system in Unreal Engine. In addition, minimal level transitions and animations were created using widget blueprints.
Once most of the game was built, the lighting was tweaked, and a post-processing volume was added. Atmospheric and exponential height fog enabled the appearance of light shafts and refraction. Dynamic lighting was used over baked lighting. The game’s result was packaged and built for a Windows 64-bit operating system.
The project met its overall goals, and the practical work created was cohesive and contained an amalgamation of the best characteristics of the game inspirations. In addition, it looked at several theories surrounding the implementation of emotion-driven design in games and incorporated this into the gameplay. User testing indicated that the game successfully told a story and invoked an emotion tied closely to nostalgia.
