Journey Through Memories
Acting Creative Director, Designer, Artist
2018 - 18, 2020 - 2020
★ About the Game:
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In the magical realm of Journey Through Memories, players guide a young witch named Vivi through a 2D storybook world. Players use their voice to move Vivi and cast spells to solve various puzzles. Discover the world left behind after the war between witches and humans, while helping lingering spirits find their peace by solving their trauma.
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This game was made using Unity and C#.
The game is released on Steam!
Feel free to email me and I can give you a steam code.
Sammy Showcase 2018 Awards:
Audio Design, 1st
Technical Achievement, 3rd
Studio Award, 3rd
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★ Design:
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Question: Ever since I was young, I've always loved everything about being a witch. I wanted to feel like a witch! How can our players experience being a witch/wizard, that's unique from other games?
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Solution: The best part about being a witch is screaming out some fancy spell's name and watching the magic do some crazy special effect! This idea was inspired by a game called Hey You, Pikachu; a game where the player can talk to a cute yellow mouse using their voice. These spells should visually look gorgeous, while being intuitive in what they do. We decided that most spells would be elemental, since the four elements of fire, water, wind, and earth, are common spell types in other magical-based games/media. For example, the spell "fire," should burn things! And because this game only uses speech recognition, that means players should be able to explore what words would also cast "fire" (like saying "burn!" or "flame!").
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Impact: From our play-tests, we've noticed that groups of friends would come to play our game, and despite it being a one-player game, we saw these friends scream the spell in front of each other! They would laugh when Vivi casts the spell and something silly happens. We've also notice some players would try to discover all the words possible to activate one spell.
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Question: Alright, we've found that players love screaming the spells. We've also found that there's ~3 seconds buffer time between saying something, and the game reacting to it. Originally, we only had the players use their voice to cast spells, but moving Vivi herself was left on the keyboard. But, the time from pressing a keyboard button and the game reacting to it has no buffer time at all. If we combined these two controllers with such egregious buffer times, the player would definitely notice! How else can we apply speech recognition to the game?
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Solution: At first, we wanted to allow players to fight monsters by casting magic. But once we noticed the slow reaction time from speech recognition, we decided to move from a fast-paced game to a slower-paced game. If this game is slow-paced, then we could explore getting rid of the keyboard as a controller, and only allow the players to use their voice. And with this, we needed a way for the game, and the player, to distinguish between moving the character versus saying a spell. We studied other speech recognition devices, such as Alexa, which required the use to say the keyword "Alexa" when talking to the device. We decided to use that same idea. To move Vivi, the player must first say "Vivi," and for the player to cast a spell, they must first say, "cast."
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Impact: Even though this game is slower that most other games, it seems like players enjoy the originality of it, and quickly learned how to play the game and use the keywords! With the help of pretty visual effects, such as sparkles once the player says "cast," it looks like Vivi is preparing her spell, which masked the slow reaction time.
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Question: How do we create a story that seamlessly blends with the puzzles, the spells, and speech recognition?
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Solution: We wanted to create a game that allows the player to feel a sense of mystery, magic, and mythology. As a slow-paced game, instead of fighting monsters, the spells helps the player solve puzzles. Each of the puzzles and levels are designed to tell a story and help the player learn new spells. The stories are told through pictures by NPC spirits and even hints the spells to use to solve the puzzle. Only by solving the puzzle, a disaster that was caused by witches a long time ago, can the player help the spirits reach peace by casting "prayer" at their shrine.
For example, the images below shows the design of a spirit's past, what their puzzle looks like, and the final version in the game! From the story, we wanted to show how the witches would use a fire spell (a spell that the player has learned by now) and then a water spell to submerge the house in water. Once the players reached the puzzle, they would see the house already submerged! If they followed the sequence of spells used in the story, they would also be able to solve the puzzle, thus helping the Spirit reach peace! In this puzzle, when the player casts "fire," they would free the Spirit's child from the house's remains, and the water spell would help Vivi herself get to the shrine.
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Impact: We saw players "gasp!" and smile as they learn more about each Spirit's story and solve each puzzle. Each puzzle is intuitive enough where players slowly learn what spells they can use, and it's that sense of discovering a new spell that makes this game feel so special!
★ Additional Screenshots from the Game: