The World After – The inventory

Today I’m going to tell you how the inventory was implemented in The World After.

An inventory-less adventure

Since we were just beginning our transition to game development, we didn’t yet know exactly what features we could implement in the game.

For the writing, Guillaume was very much inspired by a small independent German game called Moral King. This little FMV game made in a very short time with a very small budget was perfectly linear but was not an interactive movie. So he followed his instincts and wrote the simplest script possible and didn’t add any inventory in The World After. We started shooting with that in mind.

Adventure Creator comes in

On a rainy day when we couldn’t shoot, Lesly looked for a way to create point and click mechanics in Unity, and found the Adventure Creator plug-in. We developed the whole game with this plug-in. It helped us a lot with the save files and localization.

So in the middle of the shoot, we added puzzles and new mechanics to the game, even going so far as to photograph all the props from the shoot on a green screen to include them in the inventory.

Additional filming

We went so far as to add days of shooting: the puzzle of the wall and the grappling hook did not exist in the original version (as attested by the Visual Novel), just like that of the making of the sanitizer, which we shot on a green screen.

Perhaps that’s why the game can be criticized for being too easy: the puzzles are just an afterthought. For our next game, the puzzles will be an integral part of the narrative. More information soon…