PENNY IN THE NORTHWEST WOODS
Play as Penny a young mouse who thinks that she is an owl, trying to get back home before nightfall after a dangerous fall from her nest. The game is aimed at younger audiences, which allowed it to standout when it was shown at the Falmouth Games EXPO.
Penny in the Northwest Woods is a short Visual Novel with light Dungeon Crawler and RPG Elements that I made solo for my narrative design module during my first year studying Games Design at Falmouth University. It was made using Unity, a third party movement system, and the Fungus Plugin.
Responsibilities on this project include:
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All 2D Art (Environments, Character Portraits, Cutscenes)
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All Writing (Dialogue, Narration, Branching Routes)
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System Design (Stats, Items, "Dice Rolling" Mechanics)
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Level / Quest Design
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Environment Design
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Audio Implementation
Whilst working on this project, I was not as experienced with programming, or more accurately knowing how to research things I did not know. As I could not figure out how to make Fungus properly interface with C# for the majority of development, I had to be inventive and come up with my own work arounds.
As this was one of my much earlier projects, I was not as experienced with programming or research, meaning the Fungus Scripting is not nearly as well optimised as it could be, especially since at the time I struggled to understand how to make it properly interface with C# and instead had to invent my own workarounds.
This involved creating blocks that worked like functions, which were called back to regularly, handling functions such as stat storage, dice rolling, and inventory. I ended up using Fungus much like one would use Blueprints for Unreal.
Despite inefficiencies, it was an excellent learning experience and I've gone on to use Fungus and other similar tools more efficiently in future projects.
This gallery shows labelled screenshots of some of the scripting and dialogue set up done in Fungus.
Some considerations had to be taken since this project was aimed at younger children. The three main stats in the game were Social, Strength and Speed, and I wanted all three options to have as many uses as each other, allowing players to build Penny differently, and get different outcomes in the narrative and dialogue.
I had to be very creative with this however, as there were certain behaviours I did not want to include, for fear of being a bad influence, whilst still keeping the stakes interesting and ensuring stats like strength were still useful.
The image above shows a work in progress document from when I was ideating one of the later encounters in the game, and trying to make all stats useful in different ways, as well as to account for different items the player may have.
GALLERY
