The Pitch (part one)

 So the big question when crafting this game has always been.

Can a game bring about a change to someones life? 

Ideally a beneficial one to the player and perhaps those around them.

Pretty big ask so lets start at the beginning.

The game started from a summer project set between my first and second years of studying my Bachelors degree for illustration, a way to keep our creativity flowing and set us up for second year by keeping us asking questions of our practice. We were given a single word prompt.

"Journey"

For me this was similar to how I'd heard some game jams were run in particular how Team Cherry started their creative journey for producing the highly popular indie darling "Hollow Knight' from the Ludlum Dare Game Jam originally creating the game Hungry knight they expanded this game to their final iteration for kickstarter with a prompt from a later game jam "Under the Surface".

The similarities did not end there, the idea of exploration for me was synonymous with a journey and thus looking at types of games that encouraged exploration I was left with two options; an open world sandbox RPG that allowed the player to explore the world at their own pace and become immersed in the storytelling hidden within settings and interactions as well as objects and props, the other being a metroidvania style game with the player utilising exploration as a means to find upgrades to their movement to open up new avenues to progress through the game. The latter of these seemed the more logical answer especially for the development team of one person (me) as well as this theme of exploration being key to most metroidvanias', one that Hollow Knight in particularly had strived to achieve at every design choice.

The first question I wanted to answer for this prompt was "Where was the characters Journey taking place?"

One of my favourite things about successful metroidvanias' are how visually striking and different the areas of the game can look whilst still retaining a continuous theme for some examples look at Hollow Knight again.

The leafy and vegetatious "Greenpath" with its moss covered foes is a much more approachable place aesthetically than the dark, dangerous and dismal "Abyss' and both hold no visual similarities to the towering "City of Tears" with its constant downpour of rain. Each with their own colour palette and use of a spectacular musical score to emphasis the atmosphere of the environment, yet they still have the theme of insect based environment from glowing fireflies in the lamps to beetle designs within the brickwork and creepy crawling tendrils coming from the floor of the abyss as well as the use of scale each area continues to evoke this sense of your own presence being tiny in comparison to this whole world.

Looking at other examples like Super Metroid with areas like Brinstar an underground complex of caverns and jungle fairly easy to navigate and home to Space Pirates compared to Maridia which is an aquatic area filled with marine life. Both areas require different sets of skills to traverse successfully but also hold this theme of exploring a completely alien world to the player.

During this period of time whilst researching the previous games for the summer project the world was just coming to the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.  This time of isolation as well as constant televised reports of variants and vaccines led me to consider "What if the game took place in the human body?"

The player character could be a vaccine injected into the body.

Different organs would take on the role of vastly different areas due to the role they played in a human body already (Brain being electrical with all the nerves and neuron's, Stomach being an acid/fire based area due to stomach acid dissolve food and the lungs could be a fungal area with the bronchioles looking like trees and air based illnesses that affect the lungs being fungal based like pollen for hay fever)

Brain Neuron's firing.

Lung scan on left and the underside of a tree on the right.

Now a good solid idea for the setting was providing intriguing foundations for the game with more exciting ideas popping up when looking into different areas having NPC's / puzzles / enemies / bosses / design elements, all things I slightly looked into during the original project. Now I needed to look back at how this game could and possibly be more than a game, how could this game change lives . . .