Forgotton Anne takes place in a fictional world called Forgotten Lands, a magical parallel universe where lost objects that were once loved by their owners — everything from missing socks to discarded lamps — come to life, hoping one day that they might be remembered again and returned to the real world.
Forgotton Anne plays as a seamless cinematic adventure game with light puzzle & platforming elements. The player directly controls Anne from start to finish, with no loading screens, as the gameplay blends with the story, placing Anne in a role of an adolescent Enforcer who keeps order in the Forgotten Lands. Anne will set out to extinguish a rebellion that could prevent her father figure, Bonku, and herself from returning to the human world, in a gameplay directed coming of age story.
Role : Game Designer Developer : ThroughLine Games Publisher: Square Enix Release : 2018 Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One , Nintendo Switch, IOs, Android
Development Experience
Forgotton Anne was developed by a team of an average of 13 members during its main production period.
The project was tremendously ambitious for the size of the team, as it was developed to feel like an animated feature, akin to a studio Ghibli film, with a fully voiced screenplay and dialogue approximately 3 times bigger than the average theatrical film. The game was meant to play seamlessly from beginning to end, blending high-end narrative design, with naturalistic yet casual adventure platforming and puzzle elements, as its main gameplay mechanic.
My role was that of a Level Designer and Game Designer, but with such a small and holistic-driven team composition, I would often work in narrative design terms, as well as take on the main bulk of the practical implementation tasks of the gameplay content and flow in each scene.
The game was first released on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation 4 in May 2018, with ports to Nintendo Switch, IOs, and Android released the next year.
During this project I developed the following skills and practices:
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Continuously valuing ideas / features through the collaborative development process, making decisions according to scope and resources.
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Developing an iterative design proccess, that would carry through to future projects.
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Managing and planning for year-long design and implementation work.
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Capitalizing on collaborative meetings between different departments, to build a stronger, concise team-based vision for the project.
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Internalized best practices for various Version Control systems across a team of diverse disciplines and roles.
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Working closely with programmers to design and extend useful tools and level scripting pipelines that would carry through to future projects.
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Taking a game project through pre-production all the way to release.
Puzzle Design
When it came to my work on the game's puzzles, I would apply a contextual design framework to translate our specific narrative and gameplay design intentions for a casual-player oriented gameplay, to craft puzzle scenarios and bigger holistic set-pieces that felt grounded in the game's world and fantasy.
Main Puzzle Work Resposibilities :
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Designed, Greyboxed, and Implemented most of the environmental puzzles as well as some of the bigger set-piece puzzles.
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Worked closely with the Lead Designer to prototype and convert various points of the narrative subtext, into interactive gameplay sections instead of dialogue exposition. (e.g, Anne finding herself in the Crystal Cave)
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Employed a simple but effective framework for evaluating and iterating on the difficulty of our puzzle designs as the game progressed
High-Level Process for Puzzle Design :
Puzzle Design Process Example : Locomotive
This concluding set-piece puzzle for the game's prologue, could be a representative example of the holistic aproach illustrated above. This puzzle includes various intergrations for storytelling, production design, and gameplay pacing.
Additional Puzzle Work Examples :
Game Design
Outside of small design contributions to the Character-Controller (mainly Interaction Gamefeel, and Kinesthetcis) my main contribution in terms of gameplay systems, was the task of simplifying the core Arca mechanic, while at the maintaining its existing narrative function.
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Simplified the game’s main mechanic ( The Arca ) from an analogue resource system to a binary one, subsequently alowing the player to read the environment as a circuitry with the aim to feel more accessible to casual audiences
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Helped in abstracting the "Anima Flow" narrative-induced gameplay to a more readable system, allowing the team to express it in a simpler way
Design Process Example : Reworking the Arca Mechanic