Posted October 10, 2023 by Sarah Chambers
Welcome to my second dev log!
The subject of this dev log is the game I ended up pitching to my group. As per my last dev log, I went with the virtual reality theme and created a concept called Vidarium. In Vidarium, you play as a boy who goes to a virtual reality school. After testing new mind-scan technology, several of his classmates get trapped inside some of their worst memories, and he has to help them escape.
When I first created this concept, it was mostly just a basic visual novel. I decided that it needed a bit more of a hook. I came up with a system where the player is presented with a dialogue box with most of the sentence covered by a glitch effect. Most of the screen is also covered with this effect. As the player searches the area and discovers more about each classmates situation, the glitch effect starts to disappear. When the room and the dialogue box is fully uncovered, the player can have a conversation with the trapped classmate and snap them back into reality.
This was a fun thought experiment, especially since my group made physical paper prototypes (I would not recommend making a visual novel style game in physical form). In the end, we ended up going with a more gameplay-focused pitch. I'm interested to see how the game and our team will develop.
Thanks for reading!