Many a thing! I’ll summarise here.

Landmark research

I’ve done an excel about landmarks.

Exciting, I know!

I’ve also done questionnaire for it, but I need to fill out an ethics form first, so that’s a bit of a work in progress and I won’t show the form just now.

I also found commentary on the landmarks on Google Maps. I found the things that felt relevant and put them on a document. I also started to sketch out other important things around each landmark, but I’m keeping that a secret.

Life is Strange, Gone Home and other character research

It is soon time to start creating the spirits characters, which is terrifying. To prepare for this I have watched Life is Strange gameplay video, played Gone Home, played the second Life is Strange game’s demo, and watched GDC talks about character creation. I also skimmed through the Game Narrative Toolbox and made templates for characters in the future based on that and the videos I’d watched.

Besides this, I researched into tropes. I’ve absentmindedly thought that I was dealing with Magic Realism, but upon further research, it seems the genre of the game is closer to supernatural. Paranormal is another good genre to research into, and I looked at tropes for all of these.

There has been too many findings to put all here, but I’ll run through some interesting ones:

• Both in Gone Home and Life is Strange you see the living space of the characters, and it’s important part of characterisation
• The way to build relationships with the characters is spend time with them, as emotional bonds take time. You also want to have player experiencing things with the characters, and preferably share emotional states.
• In Life is Strange series, the stories work because there is primary most important attachment/relationship
• Magic realism has connections to surrealism, dream logic and poetry, whereas supernatural has roots in folklore and mythology, and paranormal has connections to folklore, fairy tales and popular culture
• Interesting tropes: Someone turns to the dark side, pentagram on the map, interspecies coupling, vengeful spirits, occupation with the soul, ghostbuster as a profession

Unity prototype