Blind Spot

Project Breakdown

Blind Spot is short apocalyptic adventure experience as an academic project where the goal was to create an adventure game prototype. The final product was a low-poly narrative demo, which you can check out by clicking the button bellow.

Check it out!

Team

During this project, I acted as a game designer, writer and producer. I also counted with a programmer (Gabriel Teixeira) and an artist (Eduardo Pereira) for this project. The good nature and organization of this small team garanteed an easy-going project that more than achieved its purpose.

Project Goals

The academic goals behind this project was to make a demo that displayed basic mechanics in the adventure genre, such as puzzles and dialogues, as well as developed a good structured narrative. The team also decided to make the project in 3D as a way to challenge ourselves into something none of us had worked before.

Responsabilities:

Create design documentation
Promote clear communication in a small team of programmers and artists;

Design gameplay and narrative;
Maintain comprehensible design documentation;
Utilize project tools to garantee deadlines were met.

Research

We decided to focus our project in the dystopian and drama genres. Using multimidiatic references, we focused on a young adult audience, story-driven and indie players.

References:

Dead Static Drive (worldbuilding and graphics)
Oxenfree (mechanics and narrative design)
Totsukuni no Shoujo (worldbuilding)

Overland (worldbuilding and graphics)
Road 96 (narrative)
Wheels of Aurelia (narrative)
Firewatch (narrative design and graphics)

Scenarios

The Campsite is an ample space scenario where the player begins their adventure. It offers them a calm place to try their controls, specially with the heavy pickup truck. They also have their first try at picking up objects in the world and putting them in their backpack.

The Radio Towers are checkpoints where the player can have dialogues with Jake and learn more about the siblings' backstory. Quick saves also happen here.

The Road is where the player will spend most of their time meetings NPCs and enemies. They can also carefully explore and try to find some useful resources.

Mechanics

Besides being a heavily narrative game, Blind Spot relies on resource management and exploration. The player progresses by finding lost items in the world, talking to NPCs and managing their ammo and gas. Because of the short development time and academic tasks, the demo itself focuses on exploration and dialogue rather than resource management.

Narrative

The process of creating Blind Spot was a very narrative-focused one, which led to the creation of Welcome to Empty Road, a Twine-made adventure capable of reporting any unforseen problems with the proposed narrative before jumping head-first into developing this 3D demo. It features simple resource management and puzzles, three different endings, as well as sound design and illustrative images, in a simpler version of what Blind Spot could be as a fully-fledged game.

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