Afraid

Afraid is a walking simulator where you talk to people about their fears. All the fears in the game are real fears from both myself and other anonymous people. While there is essentially no gameification, it is meant to be a more emotional experience that leaves the player alone with their thoughts. I chose the topic as when thinking about what a autobiographical game would be, I got caught up in a lot of the current trauma surrounding my life. Immediately I embraced this, and set out to create a game that was an environment to explore, contemplate, and somewhat validate the strong feelings I was having. When thinking of ways to best go about this, I quickly landed on the idea of a simple walking simulator. I specifically remembered a small game I had played called TL, where the player's only two actions were to walk and talk to NPCs. That game had left such a strong emotional impact on me, as with nothing to focus on besides dialogue, art, and music, I started to delve deep into what the words had meant and the emotions behind them. That was exactly the experience I wanted.

When I started building my game, the first thing I tackled was a character controller, focusing on the feeling of movement. I decided to make movement on the slower side as to try and discourage a play style of zooming between NPCs, leaving little time to think about what was just said. However, I did not want to make talking to the NPCs mandatory as I felt that the experience was to be what the player makes of it. Next I moved onto art, which I was dreading. I feel as though I cannot create the high quality art that I would like to see, so it was a daunting task to make something I felt could fit the bill. I decided to go with a simplistic style, as it would be easier to hide the disparity in my art skills. However, I soon grew attached to the what I made. The NPCs were sprites showing an emotion, generic enough to work as both a way for the player to distance themselves, as well as project onto, depending on what they emotionally gravitated towards. But what I was (and am) really happy with were the low poly models I made. I at first put them in engine with the default gray texture, planning to make textures after finishing up the placement of all the props in the level, but I soon fell in love with the gray models against the blue lights of the level and somber ambiance it created. I then shifted into making all the models different shades of gray to keep the atmosphere without keeping the same-y nature of having them all be one shade. I decided to crowd-source the fears in the game not too far into development, as I wanted the game to ring true to more people's perspectives. When looking at something I am not happy with, I really wish I could have made the game longer. When originally planning the development of the game, I expected to have time and energy over spring break to be able to create a second (or even third) location for the player to walk through, potentially with original music. Unfortunately due to both the state of the world in March 2020 and personal technology issues (long baking times, crashes, and the combination of the two will be the end of me.), I was not able to devote nearly as much time to develop the game, and ultimately had to pull back the scale, and devote myself to creating the experience I wanted to make within the singular location. Ultimately I am happy with how the final project turned out, and I hope others will feel the same emotional pull that I do.

Created for Intermediate Game Development at the NYU Game Center