The story in Remembrance

As we're putting the final touches to our game before the end of the project, it's time we talk about Remembrance's approach to storytelling and how it has evolved during the course of our development. I'm Isak Arbman, I work as the lead game writer on Remembrance, and it's my responsibility that every aspect of the game's design is in line with and complements the game's narrative. Because we decided early on that Remembrance was not going to tell its story through dialogue or text, our work as game writers has been focused more on worldbuilding. But we have also done a lot of traditional writing, like a backstory and even screenplays.

In our group, the writing is what is supposed to inspire the other creative disciplines when they create their content. We write environmental descriptions for our graphics artists to base their art on, as well as screenplays to inspire the sound design team who are responsible for conveying the backstory through their work. The work we put into the game is very much indirect, seeing as how there is no actual text in the game. We lay the foundation for all the assets that make up Remembrance.

When the project started, all we had was a basic concept of what the game was supposed to be, but there was no real jumping-off point when it came to the story. We had to start with defining the main character and the world in which the game takes place. Remembrance is set in an abandoned world, so we created a backstory for why it was abandoned. The main character uses mysterious powers to navigate the environment, so we tied the character into the backstory and explained these powers. After that we were all able to create a context for what you are trying to do in the game. We figured you would have to collect something, but what was not clear. We decided it would have to be tied to the story somehow, but the challenge lay in not using images or the written word. This is where the idea for “soundscapes” came into play. They are a sort of flashback sequence that will activate when you enter special areas in the game world, told entirely with sound-effects. It was really important that these soundscapes did not include voice acting, as the characters that inhabited this world do not communicate the way we do. We do have sounds that are meant to sound humanoid, however, to convey emotion in the scenes, like screams to convey fright.

As we are preparing to finally present our game, I reflect on what an interesting experience it has been to work as a game writer for a game like Remembrance. It was a welcome challenge for me to work on a game that truly made me think differently about my approach to writing and how it would affect the game. It has given me so much experience that I feel will help me a lot moving forward.

- Isak

Heroes

We’ve been quite quiet lately. There have been many things to do, important stuff to fix, and not too much time to write blog posts. In some ways that’s a shame, but good things will come out of it. For example we’re working hard on creating a trailer for you all to enjoy. Of course we will make sure to share it with you when it’s done.

There’s been a lot of heroes in this project group. People who worked hard, and put in far more hours than can be demanded. I know that everyone in the group are thankful towards those individuals, that they’ve worked as hard as they’ve actually done, for without them we wouldn’t even be close to have a product as good as it currently is.

We’ve been kind of careful to show too much progress. Concept art and actual in game footage has been scarce. This is mostly because we initially agreed on not showing unfinished things, things that people might find odd. Also, the main character’s colours are a little bit too similar to the colours of another famous game character, but that is easy to change.

I want to sneak in a picture of some epic environment though (keep in mind it is still a work in progress), and with it introduce our main character:

In-game screenshot

Our hero
Our hero, or main character, got no name. Nor does it have a specific sex. We wanted to keep the main character as undefined as possible – it should be up to the player to build their own picture of what happened in the world, who the main character is, and what role it played in the events before the beginning of the game. We want the player to interpret as much as possible.

As you can see in the picture though, the character wears a poncho, and got some sort of peg legs. It also has antennae (or maybe it’s some weird kind of ears?) connected to the side of its head. It is a humanoid; it shares some traits with the regular human, but is something completely different. 

Like the environment, the main character was also “created” already in the pre-production phase. We had a general idea of how we wanted the character to look, and the process from early concepts to the current form can be seen here: 

Early character concepts by Gabriel Björk Stiernström



Character concept by Johan Wibrink

Possible colour combinations

The history of the character is unknown to the player (like everything in the game), but we developers know what happened. We know what the main character did before the beginning of the game. As I wrote earlier, we will try to use “audio flashbacks” to tell the story, this will hopefully help the player interpret.

If the player doesn’t understand the audio, it doesn’t really matter too much. We can always hide behind the fact that we wanted to make an experimental game, with different solutions when it comes to gameplay as well as narrative. If the player fails to understand that the audio actually is a flashback though, we have failed. It’s exciting, and a unique learning experience, both for me and Isak Arbman as a game writers, as well as for the sound designers.

What we can conclude with is that the main character is – and will remain – a mystery, in the way that we wanted it to be from the beginning.

- Lukas

The music in Remembrance

The time has come to talk about the musical aspects of the game. My name is Gustav Arneback and I am the lead musician in the team, and in charge for keeping the music in line with the rest of the game. As Remembrance is a game with a heavy focus on the aesthetics and an emphasis on creating a strong relation between the different disciplines (graphics, music, sound and story), it is important that the music manages to deliver something coherent together with the rest of the asethetics.

Early on in the project we had an idea about almost blending the line between sound and music. The early musical ideas were very ambient and acted almost as an soundwall presented with music. With minimalistic melodies and dark pads the music were meant to create an atmosphere for the game. An example of this was presented in the first blogpost by our project lead Lukas Bergstrand.

As of today, we are halfway through the project and the musical direction has kind of been divided into two seperate musical expressions. One for the general explorative, melodybased orchestral pieces and one for the more ambient and dark atmosphere-inducing pieces needed to represent different feelings in the game’s points of interests.

To create a coherent feeling in the music our musician Arvid Wiesand created the game’s main theme, not only to act as a representation of the game musically but also to be used as a music template with musical ideas to build different musical pieces in the game. An approach also used by Austin Wintory in his beautiful soundtrack to the game Journey where he based alot of the music around one main melody.

There is still a long way to go for the music to live in symbiosis with the rest of the game but we’re closing in on our goal with each day that goes. Until we have something new to share on the musical side of things I will leave you with a taste of the game’s main theme!

- Gustav

Main Theme by Arvid Wiesand.

Milestone presentation

Yesterday we (together with the rest of the project groups) presented our game during a "milestone presentation" in front of an audience, as well as a jury consisting of people in different ways connected to the gaming industry.

Gustav Arneback was our representative on the stage. He did a great job! One could say that our game has an artistic focus, and the representative from Skövde Kulturhus (Skövde cultural centre), Thomas Odrell, said that he could very well imagine himself getting lost for a couple of hours in a game like Remembrance. I call that quite good critique!

We still have a long way left to go, and a lot of hard work is still needed, but to get that kind of positive response is always nice.

- Lukas


Gustav Arneback during the presentation.

The art of Remembrance and the thoughts behind it

Today we will be talking about art! But before we start doing that I would just like to introduce myself and to let you know how I relate to the game Remembrance. I’m Gabriel Björk Stiernström and have been a part of Remembrance since the very beginning of this project, since a few game concepts were discussed between me and the talented Gustav Arneback (who now carries the title of being the projects Lead Musician)! We talked about the last time we felt truly amazed by what a game could accomplish and how immersed we would feel in the games that we played. In recent years of playing games I’ve myself felt that the lack of amazement and wonder have grown bigger, that most games feel the same and repetitive. Almost as if they are all following a certain formula that is to “promise” the success of the game. The thing is that I understand the mindset of If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and I know that (most) big companies are afraid to take risks with new innovative ideas. But as far as I see it this might just be the core of the problem, I’d rather see a failed attempt at something new than a successful tenth game in a franchise. And in comes the indie developers!

Instead of playing the big blockbuster games I began to understand that I was more drawn to indie-developed games. And as for many it all began with Minecraft, a game which many would say look looks downright awful, which I thought too at first, but once I got acquainted with the game I couldn’t stop playing it. I was hooked. After a while the graphics didn’t bug me anymore and along with the sound effects and music it instead made for a unique, charming and absolutely beautiful game in its own special way. Once the indie-market began showing itself I got around to playing games such as World of Goo, Braid, Limbo and Fez and amongst other games I enjoyed these thoroughly. They reminded me of what games can be and what games mustn't be, and all of them had their unique and charming style of graphics to them. Indie developers clearly has another mindset when it comes to the graphics and how it can not only help with the emotion and feeling, but how it can elevate the design and mechanics of the game.

Enter our game Remembrance! A game where the of use shapes, colours and composition will help to entrap the players in our world. When developing the graphics for the game we have been looking to a lot of places, at first I wanted to go with something similar to Monument Valley. A game using a lot of vibrant colours and gradients with very little geometry. Then I looked to Journey, another beautiful game where textures are for the most part very absent and where the atmosphere plays the biggest role. Though being afraid that people would associate our game to much with Journey we had to find another source of inspiration, and very conveniently the game Firewatch by Campo Santo was released. Once again the textures aren’t the important part here, as most objects only have a diffuse color. Campo Santo also have a fantastic dev blog and a great GDC Talk about their art which have been really helpful to us. We have actually read quite a few dev blogs from different studios to better understand what problems might occur and/or how to solve them or avoid them. The Witness has been another great source of inspiration and we are more along the lines of using their shape language on our meshes, meaning a lot of hard edges (where the light breaks) and distinct geometry on the actual models.

Since the world is so vast and yet empty it is important to make all of the things that’s in it feel alive. We will therefore have wind flowing through the grass and on the branches of trees, while leaves dance their way down to the ground. The rivers will be full of life with its swift motions and particles will traverse the grassy planes. It is a wish to add in some animals here and there (such as birds) to make the place feel even more inhabited. We were  initially planning on having NPC’s in the world, which would help with the storytelling and with the feeling, but because of the time constraint we have decided cut this part out for now. Instead focus have been on our main character which I will write another post about. For now I will leave you with an early in-game graphics test!

- Gabriel


Early in-game graphics test

Initial work, storytelling and audio

We have now worked on Remembrance for more than three weeks. A lot of things happened already during the first few days. Many decisions and changes were made, both big and small ones, especially when it came to the actual gameplay design. To be honest, in the original design document made before the initial pitch we didn’t include any specific design decisions at all, since we had no designers in the group at that point.

From the start we had an idea of the player being able to collect something to help explain the world and story; perhaps tokens or runestones with a weird foreign language written on it. Despite the fact that we wrote in the design document that we wanted to break conventions, the part about collecting physical objects didn’t really fit into the game. We also wrote that we wanted to explore the possibility of different disciplines working together in unusual ways – for example audio or music helping to tell a story in a more significant way. That idea gave birth to one of the biggest initial changes: the idea of “collecting” audio.

After refining the idea we agreed on telling the story solely via audio. No text, no (clear) voices, nothing except sound. We also agreed on creating seven unique “points of interest” in the world, each with a unique meaning for the main storyline. These points could be old temples, caves, or perhaps a giant tree in the middle of a field. The storyline is not something that is happening as you’re there, but rather something that you all of a sudden can recall happened on the spot. Hence the title of the game, Remembrance. Exactly what happened, or the main character's connection to the events, remains vague and unclear. It is up to the player to interpret.

Telling a story only via sound is an odd idea, and we still don’t know how well it will work. As a game writer, had I not been the project leader, I would probably still have no clue how the sound engineers would solve it. I gave them a manuscript, and told them to rework it into an audio file without voice acting. At the moment they’re making something that reminds me of a radio drama with sound effects.

The process is ongoing, and hopefully we’ll be able to find out soon enough how well it will work. If there’s a lot of problems, then on to plan B! But what is plan B? We’re not quite sure yet.

Next blog post, focusing on the initial graphical concept work, will be written by our lead graphical atist and art director Gabriel. Stay tuned!

- Lukas

A beginning

Prologue
As of this first developer update, our game, currently called Remembrance, is still not much more than a school project. It will remain a school project for the next 8-10 weeks. What happens after these next two months we have yet to see, but hopefully the group will continue to work on the game.

At the moment we are 17 students working together on a daily basis. The group consists of all the disciplines that should be involved in making a game: graphic artists (2D, 3D and animation), sound designers, musicians, programmers, designers, and game writers. All of us study our respective disciplines at the University of Skövde in Sweden, currently in the second year out of three.

In the beginning, four of the members in the group got together to pitch the game idea for the rest of the students for the upcoming school project. The basic idea was to make something unconventional. In the pre-pitch phase, we created some concept art and music to use during the pitch (together with a far too long design document), which will be included below:

Pre-pitch concept art by Gabriel Björk Stiernström.



Pre-pitch concept art by Gabriel Björk Stiernström.

Pre-pitch concept music by Gustav Arneback.

The game

The point of the game is quite hard to describe without spoiling the mechanics, something that we on day one agreed on trying to avoid. We want the mechanics to come as a surprise to the player. This will also in some ways compromise the openness of this development blog.

As already noted, we wanted the game to be unconventional. When we use the word unconventional, we’re not talking about revolutionizing the game industry. Rather, we had the idea to make a game that challenges what you, the player, have learned from all those years you’ve played video games. Something that forces you to think differently, and act differently. We won’t even be close to making it as extreme as Antichamber (2013), but daring to try new things will give you new possibilities to explore different parts of the world around you.

The game as we think of it right now falls in the same category as games such as Journey (2012) and Flower (2009), which are both adventure/art games. We want our game to be beautiful, and we want to give the player an opportunity to explore an abandoned but stunning world. Graphically, we're aiming to make a stylistic game, taking inspiration from the newly released Firewatch (2016). We chose this approach in part because it would suit the world and theme of the game, but also so that we would be able to create something presentable in only ten weeks.

The goal for the player is to help the main character rediscover its past. (We're writing "it" since the character shouldn't be thought of as a man or a woman. We want it to be a humanoid, sharing some aspects with a regular human, but not much more than that.) The main character, and others of its kind, used to inhabit this world, but for reasons unknown they're all gone now. for some reason though, the main character has returned, but without any memory of who it is, or what role it played in the now abandoned world.

Around the world there will be seven “points of interest”, all including a specific memory (a flashback of sorts), one by one helping the main character remember what has happened. When all seven places and memories have been found, the player will hopefully have at least a hunch of what happened in the world.

In the upcoming development blogs we will talk more about all the different disciplines, initially focusing on graphics and music.

Stay tuned!

- Lukas