When We Were One – Morphweasel.com

Dec 12

An update on When We Were One

By Morphweasel Game Design, website

Just a quick update to let you know that the When We Were One portfolio page is updated with a gameplay video of the Desert City level and download links to the game’s visualization, prototype and the actual Desert City demo. The version that is online right now still suffers from quite horrible performance issues, that’s why you need quite a bad ass PC to play it.

However, with the help of our friend Steff, Max and I found the culprit that is causing the framedrops in the game. We are working on a fix right now, so expect a new version of the level to be online by the end of next week. I will update this post to inform you when that has happened.

Dec 08

Creating “When We Were One”

By Morphweasel 3D, Concept art, Game Design

I have always been intrigued by games with focus on mood and atmosphere, like Journey (by Thatgamecompany) and Limbo (by Playdead). I knew that I wanted to work on games like these when I grow up. But since I’ll probably never grow up, I gave it a chance to do it right now, for the last year of my study program.

Inspiration

When We Were One screenshot The whole idea behind When We Were One came into existence after seeing the movie Gravity in the local cinema. I was intrigued by the way the movie uses both visuals and audio to show big contrasts in mood and atmosphere. Since the movie is set in space, there are moments where you hear (almost) no sounds at all. The protagonist can enter an exploding space station in the next scene, resulting in an ocean of bombastic sounds. This way, audio really helps to complement the contrast between very wide and open spaces (alone, hovering in space) and very narrow claustrophobic spaces (alone in the broken space station). After seeing the movie, I knew I wanted to make a game based on multiple storylines (what they call a “mosaic story” in film making terms) where each storyline is a contrast in atmosphere compared to the other. The individual storylines are intertwined somehow and together, they should tell a bigger story. Kind of like the movies Babel and Cloud Atlas do, for example.