The Favour
Solo project
As for my honours project during my degree in Games Design and Production, I felt that I wanted to create a game that encompassed my tastes, passion and experiences.
Check out the itch.io page!
(And try the game out for yourself)
https://paninoeporchetta.itch.io/the-favour
The Favour is a short game created in Godot, which goes through the story of the Japanese folktale of The Crane’s Return of a Favour (鶴の恩返し・Tsuru no Ongaeshi) with a horror spin, in a style which is a mix between an illustrated storybook and a visual novel adventure. The horror aspect was added out of my own desire to explore the unsettling angle of this story, something which stood out to me in the past.
My aim was to create and iterate a polished game which uses visuals that, together with the media of the video game, play with, and subvert, the player’s expectations and generate distress and unease. The subversion was designed to be very visual - the game is set up as if it is being played on retro hardware. When the game progresses into the supernatural, more and more realistic elements begin appearing, making the player doubt the pre-established implied rules of the game world.
(Pictured below: An early concept of the main visual subversion of the game)
I planned the assets, their composition, and what they would represent in the story. I paid attention to the timing and the choices of what and when to show were made carefully.
I came up with the designs for the two main (and only) characters. One of them a princess, and the other a farmer - I tried referencing both real life clothes from throughout the Edo period, and other depictions of these characters in the original folktale.
Because of the multi-media elements at the core of The Favour, I decided to represent the mantis through the technique or origami - something which incorporates Japanese culture, the anatomy of mantises, and my own experience with the art.
This is a video of the pre-production test, before the game entered the production stage.
These are some screenshots from the finished game, complete with the retro-styled CRT shader.
