Design-A-Week #2

Idea Memories Overview Memories are an integral portion of everyone's day-to-day life. They help us remember simple things like how to get to work, friends and family names, to the more complex, like the detailed remembrance of your high school graduation, wedding, first child's birth, etc. In games, memories are usually just used as flashbacks to periods either in the main character's history before the game, or even further beyond to events that lead to main character's involvement in saving the world/princess/his own self. With this design-a-week, I wanted to explore a different method for using memory, and integrating them into the in-game cinematics and NPC dialog a player would experience during their journey throughout the world. Design The player's memory is broken into two portions: Storage and Recollection. o Players use their Storage to remember important events during the course of the game. o During certain dialog sequences, the player will be asked certain questions that they'll need to choose the answer to, and they can use their Recollection of past remembered events to help them determine the correct answers and help move their game in a more favorable direction. Storage During key cinematics and scenes throughout the game, the player can use their memory to store key portions of the event. These key portions come in two forms: Visual and audio o Visual memories are stored like a snapshot in the memory During the scene, the player can bring up a small square on the screen and take snapshots of the scene that appears within those squares. The player then remembers that portion of scene and anything that occurred during the cinematic, as long as it happens within the square The player would be able to place multiple squares within a scene, and move them around as necessary to help remember the most vital portions of the scene. o Audio memories are literally recordings of the dialog that occurs during the scene. The player will not be allowed to record all the dialog in a scene, rather they can record short clips The player needs to be alert and listen in on the dialog between the characters in the scene in order to pick out the dialog they need to remember. Recollection When recalling the memories, the cinematic and dialog in question plays again, only with the portions the player chose not to store would be unintelligible. o For visual memories, anything within the visual squares would still be colored and clear,

but the rest of the scene would be greyscale and fuzzy. o For audio memories, the portions of the conversation the player chose to remember would come through clear, but other pieces would sound similar to static. During these recollections, the player can try and fire synapses to remember portions of the memory beyond the pieces that they stored. o Synapses are earned throughout the course of the game as a sort of currency, and the player can use as many synapses as they want during the course of a memory to try and remember as much as they can, but once used, synapses do not return. o Synapses can be used on both audio and visual portions of the memory to try and remember important information.

Example Recollection Scenario Early on in the game, the player views a scene where one of the NPCs mentions they are headed to a certain village. Later, the player is questioned by a separate NPC who asks if they know where the other NPC was headed. o If the player had chosen to record the correct information from the earlier scene, the correct answer would be highlighted as such, and they could tell the second NPC the correct answer o If the player did not remember the correct piece of information, in this case the audio of the first NPC saying where he was headed, the player could try to recall the memory and use a synapse to hear the dialog clearly, or try and ascertain on their own through the garbled dialog where the npc was headed and take a guess at it.