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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.

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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, PlayStation 4 in May 2018, with ports to Switch, IOs, and Android released the next year.

During this project I developed the following skills and practices:

  • Continuously valuing ideas / features through the collaborative development process, making hard decisions according to scope and resources.
     

  • Developing an iterative puzzle-design framework, that would carry through to future projects.
     

  • Managing and planning year-long design and implementation work.
     

  • Capitalizing on collaborative meetings between different departments, instead of shying away from them, to build a better, concise team based vision for the project.
     

  • Best practices for various version control systems between departments across a mid-sized team
     

  • Working closely with programmers and engineers to design and extend useful tools and level scripting pipelines that would carry through to future projects.
     

  • Taking a game project through pre-production all the way to release.

Development

Puzzle Design

When it came to my work on the game's puzzles, I would apply a contextual puzzle design framework to translate our narrative context mandates, and casual-player oriented gameplay, to puzzle scenarios and bigger holistic set-pieces.

  • Designed, Greyboxed, and Implemented most of the environmental puzzles as well as the bigger Set-Piece puzzles.
     

  • Prototyped and Converted various points of the narrative subtext to interactive gameplay sections instead of dialogue exposition.
    (for instance, Anne finding herself in the Crystal Cave)

     

  • Developed an easy to use framework for iterating on the difficulty of our puzzle progression, according to the team mandates.

Puzzle Design Examples  :

Puzzle Example 1 : The Locomotive

Puzzle Example 2 : Bulb’s House

Puzzle Example 3 : The Lost Pieces Warehouse

Puzzle Design Process :

Puzzle Difficulty Model :

Puzzle Design

Game Design

Outside of consulting to the character controller, interaction, and kinesthetics debates with the design team, my main contribution in terms of gameplay systems, was the simplification of the game's core mechanic, while at the same time maintaining its predetermined narrative function.

  • 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

  • Helped in abstracting the "Anima Flow" narrative-induced gameplay to a more readable system, allowing the team to express it in a simpler way

Game Design

Level Design

My initial contribution when joining the team, was that of a level designer, with the task of finding subtle interactive ways of player movement flow iwithin the game's a narrative context. Under that role i have :
 

  • Adapted the game’s pre-production environments and high-level concepts to systemically playable levels throughout the game.
     

  • Implemented , playtested, and finalized, most of the environmental and contextual interactions and movement in each level.
     

  • Worked closely with the Art Director and Lead Designer to contextualize and disguise various level design abstractions (eg, moving platforms, elevators, “Anima” devices) by manufacturing and implementing each one of these abstractions accordingly.
     

  • Designed and Iterated on many of the game's prominent feature of z-depth interconnected gameplay layers and paths.
     

  • Worked closely with the writers to iterate on how we could express the blending of story and gameplay in each level/scene.