Those Left Behind is a single-player management simulator focused on creating a story with meaningful choices and branching narratives. The game takes place in post-apocalyptic Florida, after you and your family were left stranded on Earth. You must delegate tasks and choose narrative decisions that will shape the outcome of your future: escape, adapt, or purge what is left of the world.

Design Pillars

In the wake of our world’s current climate, the essential experience is to give players hope and lessen the looming fear of natural disasters and corporate greed. The three main game design pillars are:

• Portraying the human experience of struggle and survival
• Having the family dynamics reflect real world attitudes
• Storytelling that lifts the weight of number crunching from the managerial experience

There is an emphasis on storytelling as the common thread that binds the whole game together, as it is a tool that can be used to evoke emotion as well as the human experience.

Since the game takes place in post-apocalyptic Florida, the visual style combines post-apocalyptic environments with old web-style UI. The world is vast and unrecognisable, with limited colour palettes and harsh shadows. The new world hardens survivors, their faces tired and stern. Their clothes are dusty and rugged – they can’t afford to wear anything that isn’t practical. I looked at the Characters and Art Design sections of the GDD and condensed the main elements into bullet points/guide (see below). A major aspect of the art design was that none of the game assets should include green, as this portrays the death of nature on Earth.