Bird House (2023)
About
Bird House is a short narrative game that was made as part of a project for my MA in Visual Game and Media Design at The Royal Academy in Copenhagen. The project focused on using Art Direction and World Building to make a small, immersive game experience.
In Bird House, my team and I wanted to create a mundane yet emotional setting and story about grief, memory, and how the spaces we leave behind can tell a story of who we are, or were. We included aspects of magic realism and surrealism to heighten the experience, such as placing the player in the shoes of a penguin who lives in a terraced house in England.
Project Info
Role:
Narrative Designer, Programmer, Sound / Music Designer
Time Frame:
6 Weeks
Team Size:
5
Tools Used:
Unity, C#, Logic Pro
Trailer
Introduction
Bird House was the result of a 6 week assignment at the Royal Academy in which we had to create a short game or interactive experience which uses a considered Art Style to deliver a certain goal.
My role was to be one of two Narrative / Game Designers. I also ended up doing around half of the gameplay programming too and Music and Sound Design.
Key Features
Art style
Once we had decided that the story would centre around memory and loss and trying to connect to a person who is no longer here through their objects, we decided the art style should blend fractured, high detail, photogrammetry, with cleaner, low detail 3D objects and environments in order to evoke the imperfect fidelity of memory. I used an app on my phone to do the 3D scans in a way such that the meshes appear broken and frayed.
(Left)Turnaround of photogrammetry scans - (Right) example of assets in game
We also used one main environment - the house - and showed how it changes over time in 3 distinct chapters
Kitchen and Living Room in the game over the 3 chapters
Design Process
As one of the two Narrative Designers on the project, I had a big part in creating the main story of the game as well as conceiving of the broad strokes of tone and setting.
We wanted to use Environmental Storytelling to communicate the character of Mum, and later the player character, through the design of the house, its decoration, and the objects that make up a person's home. We thought that each room could communicate a different aspect of the character, acting as a physical representation of their personality.
Modified world building Mandala applied to the absent character of Mum in Bird House
We also wanted to split up the gameplay into chapters which span longer periods of story time. We also wanted to play with interactive text, so we split the 3D, navigable chapters in the house, with interactive text 'interludes'. We felt this pattern would suit the almost 'visual novel' style of Bird House, as well as keeping the gameplay interesting.
(Left) Narrative structure of Bird House (Right) example of one of the interactive text interludes
With Bird House, I learned to thoughtfully apply some of the narrative and world building techniques we have explored into an interactive medium, and how all parameters of the experience - Art, Music, Writing, and crucially Gameplay, contribute to the feeling the player has walking away from the game.
On a technical level I also learned how to create basic system architectures with a Game Manager, basic Event system, and a basic Interaction system.
What I Learned
