Nara's House
Figma
GameDev
Art
Team
About the Game
Nara's house is a Point & Click Visual Novel with multiple endings that touches on the grim reality of Generational Trauma and how to stop this gruesome cycle that is a cause for childhood trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. You follow the story of a woman named Nara who returns to her childhood home as she relives her past childhood trauma and has to make choices on how to move on with her life in an attempt to forget/let go of her past.
Genre: Point & Click Visual Novel
Theme: Trauma
Software: Figma
Platform: PC
Target Audience: Teens & Adults
Main Role: Narrative Lead
Nara's House was made with the goal of informing the players about the reality of Generational Trauma and to make victims of such to feel validated while making players realizing that they are the ones who have to stop this cycle. Inspired by games like Adventures with Anxiety by Nicky Case mixed with similar experiences from the team, we made a game that resonates with similar victims. The game resonates a serious vibe to not invalidate players who have gone through similar experiences.
Main Mechanics: Choice based dialogue that changes the ending
Secondary Mechanics: Learning the story through items & flashbacks
Unique Selling Point: A game that touches on Generational Trauma
Nara's House is the first team project when I entered Digipen Institute of Technology. In this project, we are teamed up with students from our own course User Experience & Game Design. I was partnered with 4 other students. All of us didn't have any experience in Unity so we decided to make this visual novel in Figma.
My main role in this project is the Narrative Lead of the project. I was in charge of the story and dialogue of the game. Along with that, the Character & UI/UX Designer.
Other Contributions:
- Script, Storyboarding & Narrative design
- Game Art, Character Art & UI Designs
- Wireframing of the flow of the game
- Creating and scheduling meetings & documents for the team.
Production Journey
Narrative Lead
As the Narrative Lead, I was in charge of the script and story. Going through many iterations on dialogue along with the flow of the gameplay. Much like a screenplay script, I created a work document for the team to review on the game's story. Along with that, made some storyboards as visual aids for the story. This storyboards were formatted in a similar way as ones in animation.
First Iteration
Second iteration
Storyboard of the Good End
Storyboard of the Flow of Game
Final
This document involves the final script of the story made by me. It involves dialogue, events and environment instructions for the team
Storyboard Images
This involves a Zip of all the storyboarding done in the process of the game in a clearer view.
Character Art Lead & UI Artist
As the Character Art Lead along with the Narrative designer, I made concepts of the characters in the story along with tons of sketches for the background artist to refer to. I made tons of expressions for Nara that allowed to swap based on the dialogue. Along with that, the UI design.
Nara's design concepts. Each concept had a different motherly vibe.
Nara's final design
Monk (guide) design
Nara's varying Emotions
The colors of grey black and red were inspired by Adventures with Anxiety. The eye symbol was a very important element in the story as Nara was affected by the way her mother looked at her. And how Nara looks at everything around her in her own interpretation. I added the eye element in the UI assets to have a conceisive theme to it.
Dialogue Box
Character Art Assets
This is a zip file with all the character assets, concepts, sketches & finals used during the production of this project.
UI Assets used
This involves a Zip of all the UI elements used, inclusive of gifs, animations & more.