Over the Mountains and Waves (Unity Game)


 You found my Capstone Game! Don't yet have a video, but you can totally click on the image to check the playable prototype out!
The game is still under construction; any feedback would be IMMENSELY helpful!

-- Game Info Below -- 
        The game I made for my Capstone project is called Over the Mountains and Waves, or 山海难平in Chinese. The Chinese title, which is my partial rephrasing of a beautiful line from an anonymous poem that (very) roughly translates to my loved one is somewhere beyond the mountains and waves, yet I could not traverse those barriers.” In my version, I changed the “could not” to “could barely,” affirming the probability of achieving the impossible for the sake of love while also emphasizing the difficulty in doing so. This, I think, might be a somewhat central “message” that I intend to present with my game.
        In Over the Mountains and Waves, the player assumes control of a young woman who learns that her grandmother, a sufferer of Alzheimer’s, has gone missing while she was away. The main objectives of this game are to find the grandmother and persuade the latter, who now has no memory of who the player-character is, to come home. To achieve so, the player-character must step into the shoes of the grandmother, understand when and where the grandmother thinks she dwells now, and construct a white lie or an illusion for the grandmother to win her trust as a stranger; yet all these could be remarkably difficult and emotionally taxing, since the player-character has been kept from seeing her grandmother after the premature death of her mother. Confusion, uncertainty, discontinuity, and melancholia might be the keywords of this game, or at least for the protagonist. While the task compels her to confront a painful past from which she thought she has moved on, she must do it, because she has the responsibility to take care of her grandmother, because she is “young, and thus more resilient,” and because… she still loves her grandmother, deeply.
        The game does not have a particularly strong theoretical underpinning, because I largely went with the flow without much planning when I designed it, and because I intentionally made this one different from my last game, which was visibly influenced by the games I had been playing and the research I had been performing. Still, I believe that one may find many traces in Over the Mountains and Waves that link it to other texts; for the ones I could tell, the Rusty Lake series certainly influenced how I employ visual elements and mechanics to deliver narratives, and Disco Elysium and Kentucky Route Zero absolutely fueled my passion for incorporating theatrical elements into games. On top of these, there are also theories that I have internalized: Henry Jenkin’s spatial storytelling, Tanine Allison’s emotional interactivity, and Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric, to name a few. My approach to games and game design has almost been shaped by their theories; even when I don’t make explicit references, they are there in my subconscious. Oh, last but not least, I shamelessly borrowed the soundtrack of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, which is originally Schubert’s Piano Sonata No.20 in A, D.959. 

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