Sunfall Stories

This interactive visual novel prototype pushes the player to interact with characters through drinks, manipulating people’s moods in order to help them with their problems.

Development

This game prototype was developed with Unity for the Cyberpunk Game Jam 2024 with Ersilio Petretta. We tried to explore some ideas about the game with friends, using the occasion to learn more about Unity.

We had to rush all the development of the plot and the mechanics to try to make everything, without being able to fully develop all the ideas.

The story

The setting of the story is a mysterious bar that customers find when they need it. Each chapter tells the story of a customer who tells about his life and his doubts. The player through the character of the bartender influences the customer in his choices.

We then developed a series of characters with cyberpunk histories to adapt the basic idea to the context of the game jam.

Mechanics

The core of the interaction with the NPCs is the drink creation screen. The basic idea was to establish statistics that would represent a customer as a person regarding their mood. In this way, the drinks would allow to alter those parameters in the best possible way by solving the puzzle.

In order to make the interaction with the customer clearer, an attractive visualization of the parameters was designed, which unfortunately could not be developed in time in the prototype.

The creation of the drink was simplified for the prototype in order to have a series of ingredients to combine, up to four units, to create a generic drink. The idea of ​​having a list of known drinks was postponed in order to test a simplified version of the interaction with the drink creation system.

Unfortunately, the lack of time did not allow to clearly show all the transitions and information necessary to make the player understand the consequences of his actions.

The result

The prototype made during the Game Jam is on Itch.io and is available in browser, Windows and Linux. The graphics and interactions are very limited and the user experience is undermined by some bugs that were not fixed in time for delivery. However, the prototype allowed us to experiment with Unity and try a first approach to the drink creation system and the mood system.