Noia (Team: Para, CSU Chico)

Postmortem: (In progress)

Noia, A first-person, survival horror game that leaves the player alone in a world that once seemed familiar, but now ripples with an uncomfortable silent pulsation. Players navigate hallways, conveyor belts and other industrial obstacles as they attempt to avoid making noise that draws attention to themselves. There are figures in the dark that search for anything that disturbs the silence they seem to emit. Use problem solving skills, misdirection and the understanding that presentation isn't everything, it's word-of-mouth that will draw the Kraud.

How did it start?

Noia was a conceptional game of mine that I created from a paper prototype that was played by having the player be blindfolded by a 'navigator'. The player would give indications of the direction they would like to move on a grid that was set to a maze-like structure.

How did it play?

While immersed in total darkness, the player would wear noise cancelling headphones so as to not get interference from the outside world. The object of the game was to navigate to the exit by following the ever increasing volume of the Moonlight Sonata. Meanwhile, there were other audible sounds coming from the dark as the player moved around. Shuffling feet, groaning sounds and randomized popping sounds similar to someone intensely cracking their neck, these would also increase and decrease in volume based o the player's location to the sources. If they wind up on the same quadrant, the player gets game over via a jump-scare sound.

How did the concept evolve?

I was prompted to take this concept by my professor and enroll in the next stage of the game development program which would take the game to a digital medium. Several semesters later and after the game had been voted to be in continued production over the next upper level courses, I took my project and was given a team of people who each contributed something new to the project. I now had a "real" programmer (I did what I could up until that point, but would still be left with limitations.), an artist and a level designer. However, I was missing something important: The game development files, all of them.

The version of Gamemaker that I had been using got removed from my computer when I was preparing for the new semester and for a multitude of different reasons, so had the most critical of development files. We had to start from scratch and I faced a difficult task of trying to lead a team that started off development on a bad foot. I had to keep morale up while also learning how to enforce deadlines to catch up to other teams who didn't lose semesters of work. The first few rounds of public playtesting were brutal. The comments were pretty straight forward, the game was awful and unplayable and people couldn't even add info to the section about what they enjoyed since they couldn't find anything.

I took the reports back to my team and told them that we were going about this issue the wrong way. We were at an impasse and we needed to decide if we should push forward with a concept that wasn't able to deliver at play test time and that we had no guarantee would evolve into something good.