Project description
In Memoryweaver you travel through the mind in order to heal a traumatic memory by navigating through trippy collage artworks bursting with hidden meanings. You have to be careful! As the memories in your head are fragile.
Memoryweaver was made in 2.5 days for the 2023 unwrap gamejam, where the theme was fragile. The game features an original soundtrack made exclusively with a classical guitar by Tijmen Matthys
The gameplay is short and simple; Control your character to navigate between the good memories, in search of the bad ones. Explaining the rest would be spoilers. While you play, the interactive narrator will take you through the hidden meanings of each memory as you run into them.
My contribution
This project was made in collaboration with Tijmen Matthys, Fae Muylle, Giorgio Allotta and Michiel De Paepe. Originally Tijmen and I had planned to do the gamejam with people from other majors, and also to get to know each other a bit better. But when our three other IGP teammates approached us, we were happy to oblige for them to join us. For me, it was the first real game jam I participated, plus an on-site one on top of that. It was quite the experience to plan, scope and then crunch to be able to make the deadline imposed by the jam. It was a joy to work alongside everyone on completing the game, not only within my team, but also the other teams at the jam. It was inspiring to see all the other teams do their utmost, to the point of sleeping on-site, to get their game finished. We instead focused on enforcing 8-5 schedules by limiting game aspects. Here as some main takeaways.
- The first idea isn’t the best one: Before we began on the production of our game, we each brainstormed 50 ideas, and then chose our top 3. From these top 3, we then went into another room and had a standup meeting. Here we pitched our ideas to each other to see which one we liked the most. This was not easy, as there were a lot of interesting ideas, but balancing gameplay, fun, narrative and scope was hard to do.
- The producer keeps track of everything: Originally, I went into the gamejam with the mindset that I would be the producer for the project, but I was entirely unsure how to perform this task. And so I asked Tijmen to help me with it, where he showed me that to be a good producer, you have to make sure to be proactive, to keep tabs on what everyone in the team is currently doing, and plan what they can do next. A skill I hope to have gained from experiencing it more firsthand.
We worked together as a team to consistently discuss and iterate on the design, working it further out to make it a nice blend of gameplay and narrative that we could achieve within our limited timeframe.
Further in the project, I also performed the level design of the game, both visually and gameplay wise. The goal was to create the moving collages so that they could be easily adjustable through the editor. This way, I was able to quickly adjust the routes, patterns and speeds of the obstacles so that I could make and prototype a level quickly. Due to the lack of time, I couldn’t make many iterations on paper, so instead I adjusted the paintings by replaying the levels to see what felt fair, yet still challenging. Some key memories also possess special narrator dialogue, and so splitting them into key parts of the map, while keeping them far enough away from each other so that they wouldn’t overlap, was also a challenge I had to overcome.
Where Fae focused mainly on the sound programming and necessary background aspects, I focused mainly on the gameplay programming. Such as the player and obstacle movement, as well as respawning. This was the first full project I had worked on in Unity 2D, so it was a good learning process for me.
Where necessary, I didn’t hesitate to ask for guidance, but all in all it turned out fairly programmer light due to the nature of the game.