Summary

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“What happened? I can’t remember. I think I lost something… or someone.” 

Play as an amnesiac character, explore their apartment to help them retrieve their memories of loss and face grief. Your choices will influence their memories, and their past.

◼️ Concept

Traummacher is an immersive experience in a 3D environment following a character suffering from amnesia after the loss of a loved one. By putting themselves in the shoes of this character, the player can gradually help them retrieve their memories and face their grief. The experience is very metaphorical and pictorial, and is therefore subject to interpretation.

It is a small game developed as part of a course on media and interactivity in winter 2023 at our university Université de Technologie de Compiègne. Our idea was to broach the topic of grief through an immersive game where the player's choices would impact the character's past history. We wanted to create an immersive experience with dreamlike sequences, using sound and visual ambiance to deliver the story and trigger emotions.

Note: Being a university project this experience is not 100% finished nor optimised.

Note: The source code is available on GitHub: Traummacher. We also made a VR experience based on the same topic using most of this project's assets but with differences in gameplay and storytelling: Träumer.

◼️ Demo

Developer Notes

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◼️ Gameplay

The game is developed for Windows using a mouse and a keyboard.

You can move inside the game using ZQSD. You can reorient the camera with the mouse.

A blue glow will show when it is possible to interact with an object. When you are close enough to an interactible object a hand cursor will appear and you will be able to interact with a mouse left click. Then text related to the object will be displayed, sometimes a special menu will appear giving the player a choice to make. Use directional up and down arrow keys to navigate between the possibilities in the menu and press Enter to validate your choice. The options you pick will have an impact on the character's past. After making a choice the door to the next room will open and you can continue your way into the game.

If you press Esc you will have the possibility to close the game or resume playing.

◼️ Project architecture

The project is divided into rooms. The only active room is the one the user is currently in. Transitions between rooms is handled through movement and triggers. When the user enters another room, the door closes and the previous room is disabled.

Some other interactions and transitions are handled the same way. In the corridor for example, when the user passes below a light, it buzzes.

Interaction with glowing objects will usually trigger a dreamlike sequence.

Credits

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• Sarah Frémann
• Victor Billaud

◾ Design & Writing

• Scenario: Sarah Frémann & Victor Billaud
• Level design: Sarah Frémann & Victor Billaud
• Branching narrative: Sarah Frémann & Victor Billaud

◾ Programming & Engineering

• Player input (movement & choice): mostly Victor Billaud with help from Sarah Frémann
• Environment mechanics: mostly Sarah Frémann with help from Victor Billaud
• Project architecture, integration & debug: mostly Sarah Frémann with help from Victor Billaud

◾ Visuals

• VFX, light, environment & camera effects : Sarah Frémann

◾ Audio

• Sound selection: mostly Victor Billaud with help from Sarah Frémann
• Sound integration: Sarah Frémann & Victor Billaud

Note: Most models and sounds are free-to-use assets we found on Unity Asset Store, Pixabay, Sketchfab, Poly Haven.

Technologies: Unity 2021.3.25, Audacity, paint.net, Ink, Blender, DaVinci Resolve.

My contribution

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• Co-designed the game in all aspects: scenario, gameplay, level design, branching narrative. I also co-wrote the technical documentation for the project.
• Implemented the environment's main mechanics such as interactive objects, transitions between rooms, unlocking next rooms and locking previous rooms, enabling and disabling objects depending on the story’s progression.
• Designed and implemented a modular architecture for the project using Unity’s prefab system to make most functionalities easy to reuse. I also separated the project into rooms, each being activated only when the player is allowed to be inside.
• Wrote teleportation scripts to move the player from a room to a dream setting and back.
• I was in charge of most of the integration process, meaning I set the right scripts on the right game elements and set those elements at their rightful place in the game. I also made sure everything worked as intended, which usually involved debugging and communicating with my partner.
• Handled all the visual aspects of the game: gathering and integrating 3D models, setting up light and colour mood for every room, writing coroutines for visual transitions and camera effects, implementing VFX and particle systems.
• Integrated audio assets and tweaked settings to have specific sound effects.
• Worked on sharing most of this project’s content to the Traumer VR project, making sure they would update for both projects without causing any issue as both projects were developed in parallel.
• Packaged and built the project to have a Unity package, a 3D Windows build and a VR Windows build.