“Sane” is a semi open world third person adventure game with the focus on puzzles and exploration.
The year is 1919 and you play as the young girl Ameliè who lost both of her parents in WW1.
At the start of the game Ameliè is brought to some distant relative’s mansion where she is supposed to start living from now on.
But soon after her arrival strange things start to happen and Ameliè will either have to face reality or choose to get lost in her own little wonderland.
Enter Ameliès mind, a girl who avoids reality by making up fantastical friends, imagining incredible environments and is constantly on the brink of breaking down.
“Sane” is a student project at the University of applied sciences Mainz, Germany and we expect to release the pilot episode in march, 2017.
- Semi open world with lots of hidden environments and strange characters.
- Strong story with impactful twists touching on the aftermath of WW1 with the attempt to show the traumatized mind of a war orphan.
- Your choices matter, be it dialogue or gameplay decisions small details might change the outcome and gameplay options available drastically.
- Make friends with your new family and the fantastical creatures of Ameliès mind, or don’t and gain new enemys.
- Puzzles that adapt to your playstyle and require you to use your available tools in a clever way
http://gifyu./images/fallingdoor.gif
http://gifyu./images/npc.gif
“Sane” is set in the year 1919 shortly after the end of WW1. The biggest part of the game is located in and around a small mansion in France.
Here the player gets to explore the whole estate as well as the bordering forests and caves, all warped by Ameliè’s mind into fantastical places.
An attic can become an overgrown ruin with floating islands or an underground cave might feature giant tears of water held in place by big roots.
In special key moments of the story the player enters Ameliè’s mind completely, reliving past experiences and overcoming her trauma step by step.
The Cast of “Sane” consists of two factions. There are human characters, the family who takes in Ameliè, as well as her imaginary friends.
The later consist of talking animals, hybrid creatures and furniture.
The first are believable humans with their own agendas and desires that react to the players behavior and might change their relationship to Ameliè completely over the course of the game.
http://gifyu./images/dialogue.gif
(shoutout to artemavrin, we use his amazing dialogue plugin)
Ameliè’s options are limited. As a little girl she does not possess any special abilities herself but she can become friends with characters that extend her possibilities.
This ranges from being on good terms with the residents of the mansion and thus getting access to rooms previously locked to taking control of a beetle she became friends with in order to fly to otherwise unreachable locations.
http://gifyu./images/beetle.gif
http://gifyu./images/mouse.gif
“Sane” is developed at the University of applied sciences Mainz in a small team of eight.
The team constellation has already changed a lot during the development and will continue to change since the curriculum at our university is not designed to allow for such big, multiple semester spanning projects.
This means some people graduate while others join every semester. This is a bit of a pain to deal with but we managed until now and will continue to do so and we are thankful for the chance to work on a project of this scale.
All our members are simultaneously attending other courses at university and some have part time jobs so time management is hard but we have a plan and are confident in meeting our deadlines.
Our team consists only of Artists and Designers as there are no programmers at our university.
All of our gameplay elements have been build with the amazing blueprint system in UE4.
This is our first time working with Unreal Engine but we have worked with Cryengine before and one of our team members had the chance to work with Guerrilla Games’ inhouse engine.
- Working pre-alpha prototype, all gameplay elements working and implemented
- First pass level design (chapter 1 ) done and implemented
- Story completed and first chapter implemented
- Character concepts done and placeholders implemented
- Placeholder dialogue that contains necessary information but is not “written in character”, finished and implemented
- Storyboards for cutscenes are done
As you can see in the gifs and videos at the end of this post none of the Art is final and everything is in a very rough “greyboxing” stage with all animations, characters and environments being placeholders.
We are now in a state where all our gameplay is working as intended and we can start letting people do playtesting.
Meanwhile we are going to focus on the art in order to make the game look great.
It would be awesome if we could do another pass on the gameplay afterwards to adjust pacing and puzzles according to feedback but the small timeframe and big scope of the project might not allow for this to happen (at least not during our time at university).
-Art Pass on Environments
-Art Pass on Characters
-Finalizing Dialogue
-Voice Recordings + Motion Capturing
-Animation + Locomotion
-finding a better solution to streaming our levels (massive hiccups when a level is streamed atm)
-Animatics + Ingame Cutscenes
-Music + Sound
Stay in Touch
Official Website
Facebook
Twitter
Polycount
We hope you enjoyed this first look at our game, check back here for future updates on our progress (I will try to post biweekly updates) or on the Polycount thread to see the latest art wips.
Thank you for your time,
The team behind “Sane”.
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