A series of questions was asked for each stage, as Brier outlines: "Where she’s at? What's her mental state? Is she happy or not? What are her relationships like? Where is her career at? What’s her health like?" Dawson went so far as to create graphs of how these various elements intersected, and built "sprawling spreadsheets" of all items in each level, the pair mapping out which would stay with her and which would be left behind as they simultaneously worked on the various domestic spaces. Then came biographies for the characters, and a step-by-step plan of the protagonist's life. And she ended up helping us on levels three, four and five." Telling a story We still did that for the second room but by the time we got to the third level, at that point, we'd hired a narrative designer to assist us. "At the start, it was just me and Tim making a list of what items should be there. But once the pair started on the story proper, it made more sense to work sequentially, beginning with the main character's childhood bedroom. "When we made the first kitchen, it was very much like, 'What can we stuff in here?'" Brier says. "And that’s not my only job on the project.” Given that the eight moves for Unpacking's protagonist span 35 rooms, and more than a thousand items, it's little wonder the release date slipped - first from mid to late 2020, then into early 2021, and finally to November. "I think I made it two-and-a-half years to do just the art," she says. It also enabled Brier to calculate roughly how long it might take to make the art for the full game. And that vertical slice ended up being our first demo, which was something we were able to send to publishers and to show at events - it was the one we showed at Day Of The Devs.” "We went from wanting to make half the game to a rough point to doing one room to vertical-slice level. ![]() Instead, the whole time was spent refining the kitchen.Īs many of us can attest, any kind of home improvement tends to take a good deal longer than planned, yet here it was a conscious choice and, Brier says, ultimately the right one. The original plan, Dawson says, was to spend those two months in Stugan working up three or four of those levels. Then came that pivotal GIF.īy that stage, Unpacking's narrative arc was, broadly speaking, already in place, with seven of the final game's eight stages worked out. Two months later, they emerged from Stugan’s cabin with around 70. The pair arrived at Stugan in Sweden with around a dozen items (there’s a brief debate between the two over whether the juicer or the microwave was initially present) in their virtual kitchen. "Cups and plates were good, because you can just make one plate and suddenly you’ve got four plates because you can just duplicate," Dawson says. ![]() A kitchen was the natural choice, not least since Brier and Dawson could use their own as reference. They needed a room for which narrative elements felt unnecessary: a utilitarian space that could hold plenty of familiar items.
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