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Stranded Dreamscapes 4: River of Souls

//Stranded Dreamscapes 4: River of Souls

Project Description

Old Denmark, near 1900-1910 year. Copenhagen, rainy April, so that the town is full of mist. The trees just begun to bloom despite the chilly weather. One of the water channels in the old city becomes a scene for a number of mysterious murders. Every night people find a killed in different way young man or girl on one of its bridges. Latest bar guests or early fishermen usually find them. Authorities tried to place guards but it is not much of a help: with many mysterious happenings new murder occurs. Detective becomes involved into the investigation of mysterious murders that have place on the bridges of Copenhagen canal. Every murder is different, they all have signs of some rituals, but it seems that the victims have nothing in common. Young medium gives Detective some obscure hints before her death, and the strange witness asks to find his missing girlfriend stolen from one of these bridges by some water monster… During his investigation Detective finds out that all these happenings are links in a chain, true monsters are the people, victims of the killer all have magic potential, and their souls can pay the opening of the Seven Gates that will release great ancient evil to the real world. Detective must stop this darkness and know a friend from a foe to win and survive.
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Stranded Dreamscapes 4: River of Souls

Genre
Hidden object point-and-click adventure game

​Roles: 

Lead Game Designer  Narrative Designer  Producer

Responsibilities:

Leading and ManagementNarrative DesignGeneral Game Design

Created the story concept, made presentation and pitched it to the stakeholders and publishers.

♦ Pitched the highly innovative core mechanics to the stakeholders and publishers in the USA.

Negotiated with producers from USA via e-mail, skype, organized meetings in Kiev.

Created tasks for artists, animators, programmers, composers, QA team, controlled all the production cycle, made play test of the game during all the development stages.

Research

Made a wide research of the chosen period and location, which was “Art Nouveau Copenhagen”

Performed a trip to the Copenhagen to view the locations and gather visual materials (photos, videos, historical archive materials, old and modern maps etc) for the most precise further work on the project

Researched the theme of Art Nouveau, occult and spiritual traditions in Denmark and Europe on 20-30’s, prepared list of references from literature, movies and games for the team.

Created representative mood- and reference boards on Pinterest to help the team with general understanding

Assisted Art Director with creating palette and style board for Art Guide

Conducted research into motivation and engagement mechanics fitting our target audience.

Text and narrative elements

♦ Wrote the whole scenario, including the main plot, global quests, side quests, characters, their nature, motivations and relation to the PC, dramatic moments and cinematic descriptions.

♦ Wrote all in-game texts including player character’s sentences (in response to any interaction), dialogues, item descriptions, puzzle games instructions, songs, player character’s notebook, quests, tasks and objectives.

♦ Made huge work in building narrative connections between all game elements, so that all interactions, puzzles and hooks appear in the perfect moment, empower the story and lead player from one objective to another in a natural way.

Characters

♦ Created the narrative concept for 1 Player character and 8 NPCs with their background, behavior patterns, motivation and visual references

Visualized “relations map” for the characters.
Created tasks for concept artists, character artists and animators to bring the characters to life.

Created tasks for voice overs for outsource company, has chosen voice actors from provided candidates, made feedbacks on results.

Was casting the actors for photoshoot to provide artists with appropriate material for matte painters.

Wrote detailed posing map for each character and actor through the whole game in advance.

Performed several photo shoots on my own (as photographer and designer) to get correct poses, foreshortening, compositions and close-ups for the artists.

Prepared basic storyboard for all in-game cinematics and animations, performed stage direction for artists and animators to get correct frames and solid cinematics.

♦  Made the full GDD with all quest chains, objects, puzzles, mini-games, locations descriptions, dialogues, narrative information, sound specifics, game atmosphere

♦  Designed 37 fullscreen locations with 4-5 interactive zoom-zones in each, created basic schematic wireframes for them.

♦  Designed mechanics for 18 puzzle mini-games, created schemes for artists and flowcharts for developers

♦  Designed 16 hidden object fullscreen scenes with lists of interactions and items to be found

♦  Provided location maps with all possible player interactions and sequences for developers and testers

♦  Concepted the game features mechanics

♦  Together with developers team designed highly innovative methods to present brand new mechanics and effects of the game

Designed the map for the game, concepted “map teleportation” feature, locations unlocks and hint marks on the map.

Concepted game UI.

Made periodical gameplay test sessions.

Processed publisher’s feedbacks and also alpha players’ surveys to improve the game on all stages of development.

Work examples

Please contact me if you wish to see more examples of my work, including GDDs and Game Writing.

This game can be played at:

Platform
iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac & PC
  • Period : 03.2017 - 05.2017
  • Company : Friendly Cactus
  • Publisher : BigFish Games
  • Team Size : ~30
  • Duration : 1 hour
Maud

"Thank you for coming so quickly, Detective. I'm Maud, a medium. I saw his death the moment it happened. Even the police don't know yet. For the past few nights, I've had visions of people dying on the bridges. I've foreseen my own death in a similar fashion. However, my visions are unclear. I'm hoping you can help me prevent these deaths".

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© Kristina Rutian 2020 / All rights reserved.

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