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LUCAS FURATORI MARANZATO
Gameplay
Mamoré is a 3D first-person suspense game made by my university group "Octoblind" (me and 4 colleagues) in 2021 first half, based in the real tragedy of "Madeira-Mamoré" railroad.
You play the role of a photographer and journalist that got lost in the Amazon rainforest (in Brazil) after the worker's camping site was attacked by a jaguar. Now you need to escape the forest by doing puzzles and running away from the forest spirit (inspired by the legend of Curupira).
This was our first 3D game made in Unity, and I learned a lot from it, specifically about "game scope".
We made a huge research behind the game to know more form the "Madeira-Mamoré" railroad. Our goal was to picture the tragedy, and make people aware of this accident.
Below, you can see some real photos made with cyanotype technique from that time. They gave us the inspiration to create the fictional photographer and journalist character, and of course, to create the visual identity of the game (everything gray, white and cyano):
Out main struggle with this project was for sure the big size of the game scope.
We had only 4 months to do it, but to really get it finished we would need at least 8 months, the double of the time we had...
...but our expectations about ourselves went to far, and we run out of time.
So we couldn't implement all of our ideas.
The game core loop is to walk and run by the forest collecting all documents and photos, and help the three lost workers, although it's not required to finish the game.
So is that, if the player succesfully does all these tasks, he unlocks the "good" ending, where the journalist succeds to report all the bad conditions of work through the newspaper, and stops it before it kills more people (we made up this part, it's not what really happened in the reality).
If the player does not complete all quests, the main character fails to report the bad conditions, and everything goes wrong (just like happened in the reality).
Game/Puzzle Design
The game design initially was just some "object pick up" mechanics... but we thought that would be a little bit cliche. So I began designing some 3D "simple" puzzles...
Rude mistake. We coudn't even implement all puzzles, because lack of time.
The level design was another challenge, because it's an "open world" game, and you can see below all the planning that was needed.
Level Design
Finally, here what I've learned with this project:
- Prototype and test all mechanics as soon as possible, so it's easier to see what's easy and fast to implement, and what's a programming monster;
- It's better to stick to the simple mechanics and refine it and iterate it a lot of times, than to try to do complex mechanics and to not finish it.
- It isn't enough just create the mechanics, you need to teach how to use them to the player, and give clear feedbacks. (I'm beginning to think that exaggerated feedbacks are better than missing feedbacks...)
- Playtesting in all stages of development are very, very, very welcome.
Screenshots
Thank you for your attention!
My contributions to Mamoré:
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Team Game Design and Research;
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Level Design;
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Puzzle Design;
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Shader (for picking up documents/photos/removing tree logs)
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Music Design;
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Assistant coder;
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Assistant concept artist;
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Team work and communication.
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