It was the final project of a programming course applied to Unity. The idea was to start with an adventure game cliché. Go here, talk with someone with a problem who entrusts you a task, complete it, go back to talk again, be rewarded with what he/she/it promised and look for other quest. But as I say on my blog entry where I talk about PORTAL, the most effective way to stimulate the audience is breaking its expectations. So instead of making a cookie-cutter side quest which ending is announced at the beginning, why not to finish it in a way everything gets fucked up?

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Narrative design

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I wanted to create certain spatial and narrative coherence. Every element of every happening from the disruptive plot point (wife's corpse inside the house) including that one, is previously shown in an indirectly form to increase the impact. She says "he's getting worse with the passage of time" with no concreting what kind of disease is he suffering. At same time, the quest purpose is about taking "balverine's blood" (yep, Fable's reference) in order to finish a beverage. This named elements are condiments for the buildup to craft the murderer's presence with no being predictable. Furthermore, to make sure the player realizes the husband is not in the bed, I placed it just in front of the door to be the very first thing you see, providing it added relevance. Then when you relate: the bloody corpse with the stains, the husband's horns that he hadn't before the accident and the supposed "terrible nightmare", there's information enough for the audience to understand he has been bitten by the monster you have killed and is currently in process of transformation into it, losing for moments his mental control. But once you arrive, is too late. Then he realizes the nightmare wasn't such dreamlike as he thought and to show how felt in love he was, goes with her. On the first version I made, the burning popped up too much from nowhere so I decided to add a campfire generating the coherence the project was focused, since in addition it has a function inside the space. The tool the wife is using to heal her husband. 

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Game design

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As the project was focused on the emotional response, I stablished as a pillar the immersion. HUD cuts the bound between the space and the player. It's like writing the artist's information over a painting. So having in consideration the story I wanted to tell, the main challenges for the mechanical application were about diegesis: diegetic visual signs that drive the player (wife's indications, blood and fire), diegetic life bar that allows you to know how the protagonist feels in a combat (point of view that blurs as you get hit) and diegetic mechanics of recollection to avoid menus (blood-stained sword's edge after hitting). 

The tutorial follows the philosophy of teaching the mechanic when the player must use it to never forget it. To show: how to move the player and the camera, to open a door, to talk with people, to run, to unsheathe, to save your sword, to attack and to block. Every stage individually shown just when you need it.