Decomposition is a survival horror experience that follows Gareth Zeal, a guilt-ridden man encouraged by his husband to reconcile with his estranged brother Gawain Zeal after many years.
After tracking his brother down to an abandoned church, he discovers his brother has merged with an infestation of reality bending rot. Gawain begs Gareth to deliver him dead corpses from the cemetery outside in order to keep him in control.
With each body that is brought, the church building sinks deeper into a cavernous maze below that is crawling with monsters created by the rot.
Working on a 3d game.
Going from writing primarily visual novels to working as the lead narrative designer for a 3D survival horror experience was quite jarring. Provide documentation for programmers, environmental modelers and concept artists to iterate on way in advance so we could work in parallel was essential. Through thorough and consistent communication we’ve managed to bring this dark corrupted vision to life and I’m proud of all our collective work.
Probably the biggest hurdle I experienced with this project was the constant revision that was necessary. Our vision was too large for what our time allowed, requiring ground up rewrites of the narrative design document and constant restructuring. Eventually we settled on a final outline after cutting about 2/3rds of our initial plan.
From what I hear this is pretty standard and I got used to the feeling of having to revisit older work.
concept art by DudalMaster
Scale and balance.
One of my primary concerns with this project is maintaining a balance with gameplay and narrative. Leaving the gameplay long enough without cutscenes or big narrative beats to create tension and atmosphere. Our game is probably around a half hour, in one environment so it was tricky to manage both.
My main solution to this was diversifying methods of story delivery into four types:
Stationary NPCS corpses
Old family VHS tapes
Recorded Voicemails
notes/journals
Here’s a full list of all the environmental story chunks we left lying around. As well as some descriptions I wrote to remind our writers the purpose of each segment. I wrote them when I was very tired…
concept art by DudalMaster