Happiness

The entire game story is not directly expressed to the players, since the story has been separated into fragments. For the fragmentary narrative design, your level design corresponds with it.

The story is about what miserable things happened to this family 1 year after their immigration, so we designed our game into 4 different levels, based on the 4 seasons in a year.

• The first level is spring, while players explore the environment they will start to get some information from the interactable items in the game. From those fragments of information and the dialogue they heard, players will start to feel the weird side of the story, the protagonist's family is not as happy as the players thought. We have one main enemy "Jason" here, and it tries to attack the players. "Why did my son try to kill me?" This confusion will occupy players' minds and try to find out the answer.  

• In the second chapter, the season is summer, and the entire level is covered by rain, which makes the level start to seem unrealistic, which also suggests that the player is in the protagonist's inner side world. In this level, the idea of "going back to the former level" is brought out to the players. There will be some puzzles or obstacles that block the progress of the game, and players need to go back to the former season to fix the problems. In this level, we put a new type of enemy in the game, which represents the bully situation that Jason met in the school. Since now we have two types of enemies in the game, the entire map would be too small for players to get away from them, we remove several parts of the walls in the apartment and turn the path in the building into a circular form. 

• In the third chapter, since the season Fall, we put some falling leaves in the building. It is also a hint about the situation of this dilapidated family, so the entire light of the game scene is extremely dark. The mist in the game represents the chaos inside our protagonist's mind. We bring the idea of Feng Shui to this part of the game, using the five elements of Feng Shui to design puzzles. We also introduce a new mechanic - Tai Chi into the game, to help players have a clearer view while walking in the mist. All the puzzles, collectibles, and mechanics are designed to present that our protagonist now starts to notice the true reason why those tragedies happened in his family.

• The last level is a self-redemption for our protagonist. The rest of the information and clues will be found in this part, and they will help players to have a more clear vision of the game story - what happened to Jason and Mary? What did Luke, our protagonist, do? And based on how many collectibles items our players collect, it will bring the players to 3 different levels.