A point-and-click adventure game (chapters 10 and 1) centralized around dialogue. It is about a child who lost their face; they end up in an unknown region to get it back. On the way, they are helped by others who lack human faces in exchange for listening to their stories.
How to play: mouse to interact, r to restart, esc to quit
This is an ongoing project. Feel free to leave feedback below so I can continue to improve it! 🙂
Heather Penn is an artist/designer working on Overland. She makes her own personal projects on the side with Unity and Maya, as well as comics. She was part of the UCLA Game Lab for a few years and worked on the game projects there, developing her 3D skills as a game artist. There’s not much information to be found on her–how she broke into the industry, for one, but I’m assuming the UCLA Game Lab had something to do with that, and Finji was apparently looking to hire atypical designers in order to not create something derivative of the developers’ old works.
She basically has what I want short term: a solid following as an online artist, working on a unique game with a good team as an artist/designer, and doing personal projects on the side. I would say there are a lot of artists out there working like this right now, but she’s just a more recent example I’ve come across.
For something more to chew on for notgames and Tale of Tales, and why they have abandoned videogames. As much as I hate gamers too, I don’t think it’s right to reject and blame your audience for “not understanding your art.” Sometimes it doesn’t click with people, and maybe the world isn’t ready for it yet, I don’t know.
For environmental storytelling presentation: I was rather disappointed they only covered 3D games with free camera control. They said that video games can’t exactly apply the same film set design concepts because filmmakers use directed eye, but that’s not the case with 2D games or 3D games without free camera control. Even 3D games with free camera control still uses level design to direct the player’s eyes to certain elements–isn’t that part of set design? Basic film concepts still lend themselves well to videogame scene compositions, especially games like Kentucky Route Zero or Papers, Please.
That said, the first time I actually became conscious of designer/narrative intentions in environmental storytelling in video games was Portal 2. In this level, you happen upon a room full of potato-related science project presentations. If you read into these and have been invested in the narrative so far, you learn several things that aren’t necessary to further the plot, but deepens the narrative. Not only does this room expand on the game’s frivolous but creepy tone, but it also gives you a flavor of the narrative if you were interested, if the player was inclined to give some of her time to the game to explore. It’s left quite the impression on me and it’s the reason I prefer Portal 2 over its predecessor even though the latter is arguably a better game.
