¶ Dev Team
| Stage Persona | Inmate Number | Power | Flavour | Kink | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
Alessandro Piroddi alessandro.piroddi@haw-hamburg.de @ UnPlayableGames |
🪷 2413895 |
🎲 Quantum Game Design |
☕ Coffee |
🍐 Pears |
 |
Lars Stiegmann Lars.stiegmann@haw-hamburg.de |
🪷 2618502 |
💾 Coder Extraordinaire |
Rhubarb |
🪮 Hair |
 |
Julie Vohnsen wgt684@haw-hamburg.de |
🪷 2827267 |
🎨 Multiversal Visual Design |
🔆 Sunshine |
📽️ Film |
 |
Afa ? |
🪷 ? |
🎵 Spectral Sound Design |
😶🌫️ Mystery |
🔊 Beats |
¶ Project
| True Shapes | |
|---|---|
| When | Games Master/Bachelor SoSe 25 |
| Why | Media Design 1 |
| Platform | PC |
| Game-Engine | Unity |
| Genre | 2D side-scroller narrative |
| Controls | keyboard |
| Language | English |
| Current Version | 0.0 |
¶ Inspiration
| Thomas was alone | Parable of the Polygons | Passage |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 Mike Bithell |
2014 Vi Hart & Nicky Case |
2007 Jason Rohrer |
 |
 |
 |
| A minimalist 2D platformer with expressive character design and emotional storytelling. | A minimalist 2D educational game about inclusivity and social bias. | An powerfully emotional pixel-art "experience" about the life of a digital character. |
¶ Project Development
True Shapes is meant to be a minimalist –albeit meaningful – short experience about the challanges of cultivating a personal identity that doesn't fit within society's expectations.
¶ MSCW
| Must | Should | Could | Won't | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linear Narrative - Home day 1 - Walk encounters A - Mask drop - Home day 2 - Walk encounters B - Mask choice - Walk encounters C - Wall even - Endings - - Community - - Sadness Emoji-based dialogues Expressive Choices (small immediate consequences) Minimalist Art Style Expressive Characterization |
Sounds - characters - environement |
More complex dialogues | Action gameplay Platforming Text-based narrative |
¶ Core Gameplay
The game is meant to look very abstract and minimalist: people are represented by simple squares, conversation happen as a string of emojis, the environement is drawn in a childlike contours-only style.
The player will control a protagonist character (PC) going about their daily life. Wake up, dress, get out and explore the world. All of this happens as a unidirectional side-scrilling experience, where movement is only allowed "forward" (until it isn't).
¶ Iconography
The game environements are meant to be minimalist, but vibrantly colored. A child-like drawing style is the obvious option to achieve these goals.
In this context "normal" people are represented by squares of various sizes, colors, and more or less regular shape. The main exception being our PC, which is not a square and for this reason has to wear a disguise.
¶ Movement
The PC is only allowed horizontal movement, and then only "forward", with the screen progressively blocking the way "back".
In this context, to convey how the PC is different from the other people and has to move against the grain of society, we decided to subvert the expected game-control behaviour by making the forward direction be LEFT rather than the universally conventional RIGHT.
¶ Color
The game initially presents vibrant colors. This will dynamically change with game progression: the more the PC goes through their day hiding their identity, the less vibrant and more de-saturated the colors will become.
This language is used to achieve some special effects tied to the different events and endings of the game, depending on the player's choices.
¶ Conversations & Events
Meeting non-protagonist people (NPCs) presents the PC with a variety of situations, and automatically engages the "dialogue" system:
- PC gets close enough to trigger an event
- NPC communicates something through emojis
- PC is presented with a few possible emoji answers
- NPC reacts through emojis
While purely abstract in nature, the goal of these encounters is to use contextual details (colors, images, sounds, animations, etc) to convey an emotional and behavioural vibe that the player can recognize and emotionally respond to. The idea is that, while an isolated dialogue might very well feel too abstract and meaningless, playing through a sequence of dialogues should communicate a certain pattern. This pattern has meaning in the social context of the game, and can later be altered to make players notice a difference in the game's social dynamics.
The same structure will then be used for a couple of non-conversational events, where the player's choices will affect the game's state.