A Burning Memory

About the project

In this project, we needed to create a narrative experience that could transform the way the player thinks about a certain thing, with the theme being ‘coping’. One of our group members had semi-recently been in a house fire, and told us about how often he thought about what he could have done different to prevent it from happening (no one was hurt, thankfully). We decided to base our game around that. The first week was mainly brainstorming and coming up with a good idea, and the second week was the actual development.

Gameplay

The game starts with a cutscene. You walk out of your room, see the fire, panic, and run for the door. The cutscene rewinds to the start, and gives control to the player. “Save your belonings” appears on your screen. You go and collect your teddy bear, your laptop and your phone, and run for the door. Rewind. “Put out the fire”. You grab the fire extinguisher, put out all the fire, and yet again make a go for the exit.

“Surrender to what is.”

You realize to move on, you have to accept what originally happened. You don’t touch anything, you don’t do anything differently from the cutscene at the beginning, and you simply leave the house. It breaks the loop.

“We must accept the end of something in order to build something new.”

My role in the project

We had 2 developers in our group. My main focus was on the cutscene, rewind system and the game loops. The cutscene is simply an mp4 that is played at the start.

For the rewinds, while you’re playing, the game saves a Texture2D every couple of frames, and stores these in a stack. To rewind, simply pop a Texture2D from the stack (faster if there are more saved frames) and render them on a RawImage.

The game loops simply check for which interactions have been done and resets things accordingly.