designerdougm

Darkest at Dusk

Created over a period of just under four months and less than 400 man hours Darkest at Dusk was a senior production project at Champlain College and our first production using the Unity 3D engine.

My Role

In-depth look at my role

As the Lead Narrative Designer on Darkest at Dusk I was responsible with the construction of the basic narrative, something that evolved naturally out of the desire to create an open-world game within a small enclosed space. I worked jointly with my team early on in order to facilitate a deep connection with the narrative for all members of the project. Characters who’s writings the player would encounter throughout the game were carefully constructed with their own back story and predominant personality traits. In addition I was responsible for the writing of the actual documents and excerpts the player encounters during the course of play.

I worked jointly with another designer on the core mechanics and the construction of the world layout, at every step of the way working alongside the art team to construct detailed asset lists and milestones for the project. I also worked on the implementation of the art within the game world, laying out environmental assets. In addition to my shared responsibilities as lead designer I was in charge of the creation and maintenance of detailed documentation. This primarily concerns the game design document itself which was created in conjunction with the narrative design document as a wiki. Throughout the production cycle any changes that were made were documented in order to facilitate and streamline the development process.

Detailed Overview of the Narrative

Set in the Caatinga; a seasonally dry scrubland of South America, Darkest at Dusk is a heavily narrative-driven adventure game created in the Unity 3D engine. Gameplay primarily focuses on exploration spurred onward by the introduction of narrative pieces. The overarching design places an emphasis on free-form movement allowing the player to traverse the world as he or she sees fit. In order to maintain a focus on exploration and narrative, puzzles are primarily simple often requiring the player only arrive at the challenge with the correct item.

The game focuses on three intertwined narrative structures from three different time periods; all of which take place within the game’s play space. The concept of the story falls around the cosmic event of a magnetic polar shift within the planet Earth; when the magnetism of the planet is reversed due to the planet crossing a threshold of orientation within the galaxy. In order to escape the radiation and other harmful effects the surface of the Earth and all of its inhabitants are subject to during a pole-shift, an ancient race of peoples under the guidance of a strange and powerful being constructed a device to protect a select few of their race.

Constructed from naturally occurring monopolar magnets; a resource used widely as a power source by their ancient civilization, these peoples created a perpetual motion device, a dynamo capable of emulating the same processes that occur within the core of the earth, thus creating a magnetosphere capable of providing protection from the cosmic forces which the rest of Earth found itself subject to. The player finds themselves unknowingly trapped in this area during the third pole shift that has occurred since the dynamo’s construction.

The feeling of entrapment is exacerbated by the lack of any human contact and the presence of the secretive ancient being who has since developed a strong distaste for humans. By piecing together scattered bits of disjointed information left behind by those that lived there during the second pole shift just after the turn of the millennium as well as translating texts and information left behind by the ancients that lived there during the first pole shift, the player discovers their prison is in fact a paradise.