You are a new student at this school and you arrived with excitement. But things don’t seem to be going as well as you thought they would, your new teachers and classmates don’t seem to be very friendly, lessons are hard and boring, and days like this are just not enjoyable. Luckily, you have found your only friend at this school, a calico cat. You see her almost every day, you play with her for a while during the lunch break and bring her some food from the canteen. And so your friendship continued.
Recently though, you haven’t seen your friend for several days in a row, which is quite unusual and makes you a bit worried. So you decide to explore the campus in your free time one evening to see if you can find your missing friend.
As you explore the campus, you suddenly realise that the once familiar campus seems a little different. Certain parts of it seem like they’re broken, and a part of the environment is missing. You hadn’t intended to pay any attention to these places, but in your curiosity, you put together a quick patchwork of pieces. After that, you seemed to see memories of a bad time, but your friend appeared where the pieces were, and she seemed to be guiding you somewhere.
Flashbacks:
When the player completes one of the game’s puzzles, a memory of the heroine flashes across the screen, usually for one or two frames. At the end of the memory, the calico cat appears to guide the player to the next place.
Example 1:
Example 2 (Draft):
These memories are the heroine’s painful memories of school. As she pieces together the broken campus environment she simultaneously pieces together her memories.
Ending?
When the heroine has collected all the memory fragments, the calico cat will wait for her in front of the classroom window. The cat looks out of the window, the heroine looks out of the window, and the final flashback will be the blue sky, white clouds and the school building outside the window. In order not to make the whole story too depressing, so I chose to leave the audience with an open-ended ending, but the real implication is that the heroine chose to end her life by jumping from that window.
World Setting:
The game is set in a school called ShuTan Educational Academy, and all gameplay needs to be completed within the school.
Overall Map:
The game’s archetypal setting came from my high school memories, so I used my high school’s school map directly as a template to create the in-game map
For the backgrounds in the game I also used photos I used to take in high school, which I grouped by region. The game will progress in the order of schoolyard, gym, pond, and teaching building.
I made the gameplay of the schoolyard part in the prototype, check it out here to get a rough idea.
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