Dear and departed, 2024 Capstone Project.
My capstone game idea is to create a 2D platformer set in an apocalyptic world, where you have to fight creatures and discover hidden pathways to find your friend who was taken. Throughout the game, after fighting creatures you slowly become one of them letting the grief of losing your friend get to you and ultimately ending up becoming the one thing you were desperately trying to avoid.
My Capstone game Dear + Departed is about a young boy and his friend who live in an apocalyptic world where people who experience the feeling of sadness turn into what their sadness looks like (big dark scary creatures).
My target audience is mainly teens and young adults who like sad, slow-paced story-based games. This game is aimed towards the Analog horror community, as I was heavily inspired by those stories. I decided to create this game because of my interest in dark themes, through video games, and how that strong emotion can be shown through colour and character design. The main idea driving my design was wanting to convey the story from a child's perspective and how a child would perceive the world, almost as if a child drew it. Since my research question was “How can character design and colour theory be explored in game design, to convey the declining emotions associated with anxiety and depression?” I wanted to experiment and explore colour and character design to achieve the desired emotions within my game and players. I was able to achieve my goal by getting into the habit of looking at a lot of references/influences, and theorists and using tools like Procreate for my drawings and Unity for game development.
