I’d had a story idea sitting in the back of my mind for a while, and I’d been looking for a way to stretch my creative legs again, so making a videogame felt like the obvious way to combine the two.
The game is called The Mourning Catalogue. It’s about a cat who guides souls who are having trouble passing through worlds based on the stages of grief.
Writing The Plan
I started by writing a game design document, I’m using Obsidian, which is a markdown based notes app that lets you quickly write notes, and link related ones together to create a nice ‘map’ of your project.
I read a variety of examples online and picked what spoke to me, and set up a note for each one.
This included a dev diary type thing, where I’d write down what I’d worked on each week.
Game Outline
This is a brief outline of the game I want to make below:
- Premise: The player controls Socius, a cat who guides souls through grief in different worlds.
- Gameplay Mechanics: Socius transitions from a cat to a more composed figure when guiding souls, highlighting the contrast between his two forms.
- Narrative Structure: The story unfolds in stages: Socius’s awakening, entering grief worlds, guiding souls, and returning to the house as a cat.
- Socius’s Realisation: Socius understands his true nature but chooses to continue his journey regardless.
- The Final Transformation: Socius undergoes a final transformation, shedding his old self and embracing his new identity.
- Ending: A figure awaits Socius at the end of his journey, representing a guide or a new beginning.
Managing (My Own) Expectations
I started this with the idea that it’d be a 2.5D adventure. A 3D world with a 2D set of sprites for characters and other art.
It took me about a week to completely switch to a 2D Hollow Knight inspired style, and who knows, it might switch again, I only have to answer to myself after all.
I don’t see this as indecision, I see it as a sort of exploration of how I want the player to experience the story. After all, I’ve never done this before, so I don’t know what will and won’t work until I try it, and I’m happy with that.
What this means is that everything will take longer, if I end up down a creative dead end, then so be it, but I have to acknowledge that finding my way out of it will take time.
My First System: Wind
I’m still finding my way, both with the coding, and the design of the game. I’m not happy currently with the design of the character, but in terms of the coding I’ve got a wind system implemented so far.
The idea is that the state of the soul is linked to the wind in the world, so I have implemented a global wind system (Direction and strength) which different elements in any given scene can tap into and use to affect how they move.
I have a flame reacting to this at the moment, but I intend to use it heavily to provide atmosphere and life to scenes in the game.
Linking it to a global system allows me to use specific points or actions in the game to change all wind influenced objects at once, rather than having to code individual objects and risk not getting the direction, or strength correct.
I’m pretty pleased with this so far, next is some background and then I might be ready to post some screenshots of it in action.