While You Were Away

How long have you avoided home? What will you do one day if there’s nothing to return to?

While You Were Away is an exploration game about finding solace at home, and the one’s loved and lost there.

The game is an exploration into non-linear and environmental storytelling.
Itch Page Description

I worked as the lead programmer and game designer for this game. Within a three person team, I created the VFX, Tech Art as well as the narrative system of the game.

Origin

The game While You Were Away started with a conversation with my good friend Marcy. In that conversation, I shared the story of my high school host family mom passed away with her, how we couldn’t say farewell to someone important, and how I was completely being avoidance with the truth. We later along with Tori decided to make a game about it, also about self discovery and embracing your identity, about the exploration of self, guilt and supernatural.

Magical Realism

In the process of brainstorming a story, we landed on something all three of us want to talk about, magical realism. We want the story to be relatable to real life but at the same time introduce unfamiliarity to the audience.

Next, knowing the genre of the story, we decided to create a mood board for the game, which inspired us with this mountain view at dusk. Then, we discovered few art with gigantic crystals sticking out of ground. Combining both the mountain dusk view and dusk, we created this magical realism scene.

In terms of game mechanic, we wanted to include the nature of magical realism into the mechanic. We created a non-linear narrative system where player can collect 12 audio pieces in the map. Half of the speed were voice mail from the main character’s mother, conveying the back story of the main character. The other half of the audio logs are the voice from these magical creatures who lives inside of the crystals, telling the story of their relationship and the human that had interacted with them. We want to have these two main plots of the story intertwining each other to tell a cohesive story.

Level Design

Deciding on the story about a girl’s journey going home while her car crashed on the road, we sketched out the top down map of the world map. Since we are making a wild environment, making the player feel the enormous space while not getting lost is the key. We created several key locations that’s very visible anywhere in the map for player to locate themselves, while covering most of the map with tall grass, creating a immersive experience of walking in the mountain.

We want the exploration to be semi-linear, so we set the destination, or the game ending scene to be on top of the furthest mountain, where a gigantic crystalized tree grow. After several playtesting, we were very happy about players’ natural reaction of exploring the mountain top and discovering the cave we hid there.