Estate Sale
About this project
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Team:
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Me (Programmer, Level Designer, Sound Designer)
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Sydney (Writer, Designer, Artist)
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Engine: Unreal 4 and UE Blueprint
It’s been a long time since you’ve been home. This time, you are here to prepare an estate sale for your parents’ stuff. Yes, they passed away in an accident last month. Now you must go through your parents house and decide what to keep and what to sell.
Design Process
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Experience Goal
You need a certain amount of money to pay for a student loan. But also you want to keep things that remind you of your parents. Explore the house, find new objects with stories, and balance their sentimental and monetary value.
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Core Concept
We wanted to design a narrative focused game that includes both reading and environmental storytelling. The process of preparing for an estate sale perfectly matches our game design idea. People will be reminded about a lot of memories while inspecting used items. At the same time, the places where people find the object will also connect people with the object.
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Gameplay design:
Each item has two levels of memories. Players can always unlock the first level, but they will only be able to unlock the second level by keeping the item in the box.
This gives the player a meaningful choice: keeping the item to unlock the memories with parents, or selling the item to raise money for the student loan.
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Level Design
The game happens at the house where the parents live.
Here are some of the questions I raised for myself when I was designing the level:
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Where to place the intractable items?
The items should be evenly distributed around the house. It should allow the player to meet at least one valuable item every 10-15 seconds.
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Do we want the game to be linear?
Not really, the game will be at some place between linear and open space.
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We divide the whole house into several spaces where players can explore freely. The items in each space will have a different focus. For example, items in the kitchen are mostly about happy memories of the family. While items in the bedroom are more of serious memories and potential conflict within the family.
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The intensity of the story will rise as players go through the house.
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What’s the challenge of the level?
A secret room that needs a key.
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We designed a childhood room that was locked. The key to the room is at some place in the house. We encourage players to explore the space thoroughly to find the key.
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Narrative Design
A player can never read all the memories of all the items in one play-through.
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This allows us to manipulate players’ impressions on the parents through breaking up the whole story and putting them into different item’s descriptions.
For example, there is an action figure of the father in the bedroom. It's memory told players that the father and the main character once had a happy time together. But most of the items that are related to the father are telling another story of a strict and busy father and his rebellious child.
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