The Night When He Left

Playtime: 10 minutes, roughly

The Night When He Left is a solo-developed UE4-project. It’s an interactive story about coping and the continuous revisitation of memories, and eventually finding a way out of spirals and darkness. Florence and Gone Home are big influences in terms of shaping my decision into making this into what it is; not only in terms of story, but also that it’s okay for game to be short experiences as long as you have something to say.

The Night When He Left the outcome of a break-up that cycloned into a pretty dark period of time in my life. I think it’s something many people have experienced, but that period of time of grief that you’re usually used to just endure and then finally push away, that feeling when days bleed into each other and the sensation of something weighing you down seems to spin perpetually.

So, for once, I chose to harness that darkness to make something different. Instead of seeing the darkness as something foul that I need to forget and push away, I wanted to put the feeling in the spotlight; it is a part of me, and I should embrace and value the emotions that come with it, even if they are sometimes difficult to deal with. I’ve never really been good at talking about my feelings, so using art and now the Unreal-engine kind of helped me make something that I best represents my state of mind. Communicating about mental health publicly is a bit daunting, but I think it’s a good step for me to push myself to do it.

When it comes to the art in this game, I wanted to create something that I felt like I hadn’t seen before and could really portray the more raw and personal aspect of this project. I wanted to create a style that almost would look like it was a sketched movie from my head, and I ended up with the visuals that you see now. I wanted that feeling of a low frame-rate to permeate the game, and it’s reflected in some of the particles, the environment textures, and also animations. That means that even raindrops aren’t using any kind of generated animations or automated transform animations, it’s just drawn frames that together make a scene.

The second thing I’d want to mention about the art is that I usually feel that 3D-art rarely embraces that it’s a 3D-space. A lot of time I feel like it’s trying to mimic 2D, and I wanted to make something where I fully incorporate that it is in fact 3D, it’s just very crafted. 

I chose to do everything on my own for this project. Not only to prove to myself that I could make this journey on my own, but also because I felt like I wanted everything in this project to feel extremely personal; and what better way to do that than have everything being an extension of yourself.

This project is using the FP-explorer kit by KaiWerder: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/first-person-exploration-kit