Hikikomori
A narrative game about overcoming your fear of the outside world
Category : Narrative game
Role : Game Designer/Level Designer
Duration : 48 hours
Presentation :
Hikikomori is a game in which you play as Tom, a young man who has a phobia of the outside world and stays cooped up at home all day.
One day, his cat disappears and he has to take his courage in both hands to go and find it.
He will have to go out, explore his neighborhood, meet his neighbors and overcome his fear.
The player has a stress gauge that increases when Tom is away from home. If his stress level reaches its maximum, the player automatically returns to the original house.
The player must then walk to benches to relieve his stress. He will also have to talk to different NPCs to gradually increase his stress gauge and thus be able to explore further.
This game was made in team for the Global Game Jam of February 2019 with the theme "what home means to you".
My work within the group
On this project, in addition to having participated in the design of the game mechanics, I mainly carried out the level design of the game space. It was a question of recreating a district of a city.
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I first started by defining a map of the player's journey. This had to take into account which NPCs the player needs to talk to and their positioning. Indeed, depending on his progress in the game, the player cannot reach certain NPCs because his stress bar fills up too quickly to be able to reach them.
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For the same reason, thought had to be given to the placement and spacing between each bench to prevent the player from skipping essential segments of the game.
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Once the plan was done, we had to think about the buildings needed to give the impression of being in a district of a city.
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I then needed 3D models of these buildings. Given the short time available, I chose to use Asset Forge by Kenney to combine basic assets to create the models I needed.
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I then took care of integrating all these models into the game scene in order to create the final environment:
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