COMA: a mind adventure post-mortem

The creative adventure that ended up in a coma.

I’d like to share my personal experience with the development of the video game project COMA: a mind adventure. This is an example of how much external circumstances can shatter years of work, even in small and united teams.

I’m Dani Navarro, co-author and co-director of COMA: a mind adventure. I am used to having my work talk for me, but this time I felt obliged to write this post-mortem with a focus on the creative and artistic side of the project. I hope you can take something good out of my experiences, in particular if you are starting in the world of game development and got scarce resources.

I’ll start from the very beginning, like all good stories. But before that, let me share a brief description to introduce you the project.

First Coma tech demo trailer.

A climatic incident sets the player in a long state of coma, forcing him to grow up while trapped inside of himself and search for his own redemption. All he sees is a representation of the feelings and experiences of the main character. He did something in the past that’s haunting him and will try to find a way to forgive himself. That redemption is represented with the arrival of a huge tree.

There are several layers to this message but the most fundamental is “every decision has its consequences”.

The player has the ability to change the weather and time in order to solve puzzles that are integrated in the environment.

Our references were games such as Dear Esther, Portal 2, Shadow of the Colossus and Journey.

That said, let’s start with our story:

Initially we were only two people in the project, Carlos and me, both equally responsible for the game’s authorship. But as it evolved, we have been getting significant support from many other people. Our first work together as Warcelona, a Left4Dead mod that was very well received by players and critics alike. After this, we decided to take the far riskier step of creating a project from scratch. Thus, my partner, who had better coding skills, started evaluating which game engine would be the most suitable for the game. Finally, he decided to go with Unreal Engine 3 and contacted me with a tech demo to illustrate what we could do.

What did we want to represent with this video game?

From the very beginning our roles were clear: we both were authors of the project. In general, we kept a multidisciplinary work dynamic, Carlos mainly focused on programming and puzzle design, while I was the one in charge of the art direction and creative decisions, including the script. But we kept a very close dialogue and continuously gave feedback to each other about our respective work. As Carlos said: “[...] I can also do some work on the script and he can also make some 3D models or level design or come up with ideas on the fly, that’s something I consider very important [...]”.

The initial premise was clear for both of us: We wanted to capture the point where the medium is today. As time goes on video games can deliver more mature experiences and are less afraid to deal with adult topics. My main interest was, as in every project I work on, the possibility to explore and improve my skills.

During the brainstorming stage we considered different scenarios of where the game would be set. One of the strongest contenders was proposed by my partner Carlos: His idea was about a military laboratory, nazi experiments and the like. I thought it was a bit limited and not original enough to catch the attention of our potential players. Also, it wasn’t aligned with the experimental and mature philosophy we had envisioned for the game. So I went on to think about further possible environments that would allow us to create an artistic game, both attractive and carrying a deep message. In the end I came with the idea of having the main character lie in a coma and setting the game world inside his own mind. This, on one hand, would imply that the world is imaginary, but on the flipside also allow the player to enjoy plenty of freedom, as opposed to most video game stories, in which one has to fight to survive. In this comatose state, the mind of the player is his own and only enemy.

As my partner Carlos said “[...] thanks to Dani Navarro, my colleague working on Coma, we were able to fix [the gameplay] and without that the project couldn’t have progressed [...] Dani threw away the nazi lab experiment stuff and came up with the idea of having a character lying in a coma, with a coma there wouldn’t be any limits [...]”

We only needed to place some memories in the main character’s mind, something like a family drama that would have caused him to enter a coma, and that way we would be able to create drama and tension in the story.

As the gameplay was originally based on day and night cycles, in a way turning the surroundings into another main character, it came to my mind that it would be nice to add an environmental/climatic component to the game as a key element.

And that is how COMA was born, as a project that took over two and a half years to make and with its context closely tied to its development.

Our crowdfunding campaign. First fiasco and first fightback.

On the 11th of June 2012 we launched Coma on Indiegogo, which is a popular crowdfunding platform. Realistically speaking and knowing our poor marketing resources, I was aware that it would be difficult to reach the very specific audience for our game but at the same time we had so much to win and nothing to lose.

Illustration to promote the campaign on Indiegogo based on a childlike drawing.

The response was much larger than we could have ever expected and many websites talked about the campaign (PCGamer, GiantBomb, GameElitist, Vandal, Hobbyconsolas, OnlySp, among others). Some of them were even interested in interviewing us. We got the support of over a hundred backers (whom I will be always thankful to) but sadly for us the raised money wasn’t enough. This did not discourage us and we kept fighting to turn our ideas into reality. The good vibe received from the media was more than enough for us to keep moving forward.

Why didn’t we gather enough support to fund our game? In my opinion our biggest failure was that we rushed the launch of the campaign so that the game wasn’t ready to fully showcase what the final experience would be like. We got very nice comments praising our courage and our adult approach to the game’s development in creative terms. I strongly believe that with two extra months of development we would have made it.

How to continue development without money.

We had to simultaneously keep working our day jobs and develop the project. It was hard. Personally, I had to reject several job offers to be able to dedicate the necessary time to Coma. Each one of us worked from home and it wasn’t the ideal way to do it, but at this point there was no other option. The discipline to force ourselves to keep in contact on a regular basis was important to us. However, at times it wasn’t as fluid as it should have been for a project of this size (which became even worse considering we both wanted to take part in every single aspect of the game). Still, overall it went well.

Story.

Before going into details, it’s important to define each aspect of the main character as detailed as possible: Who is he? Why is he like this? What does he want and what is he escaping from? What are his weaknesses and strengths?

For me, the best part of the story resides in how solid its premises are. That way we could overcome mistakes cropping up due to the game being rushed. Some problems emerged quite often: lack of funds, changes in the gameplay, needs of all kinds. However, when a solution was found we always managed to integrate it logically into the game.

In general a story based around a family drama looks simple but it gets quite complicated quite quickly when you try to deal with the complexity of human feelings in a game. At first glance the human mind looks like a flexible creative canvas where everything is possible, but everything turns out extremely complex when you try to give a meaning to it all - something linked to facts.

An important point in every game story is that it shouldn’t obstruct the gameplay. In a game of this kind it wasn’t difficult since our target audience would probably enjoy a purely narrative experience. However, we wanted to let players with different preferences enter the world as well and be able to focus solely on puzzle solving if they wanted to. To reward these players and make them still understand the story completely, I thought it would be interesting to enhance their experience and offer the story as a puzzle itself, larger and intangible.

Narrative.

Our lack of resources was the most crippling drawback we had to deal with during the first stages of development. We were continuously testing the ground to see how far could we could get (for example, when integrating the narrative into the environment itself). Since we were talking about a very personal story, it’s extremely important that the player feels a connection to the in-game characters. My experience in short film production allowed me to create a few videos using real images that helped to humanize the protagonists (even if the player could never see their faces, the visual change between video-reality and video-game-mind was justified/explained). However, I didn’t want this to be a static resource, so I suggested to my partner Carlos that he should find a way to not only use walls and rocks but also integrate the videos into the game environment as simulated memories so both could serve as a canvas into which messages and symbols could be carved.

Characters.

I designed the concept arts above illustrating the visual aspect of the fight against the giant. On the right, minion design is represented.

We couldn’t animate characters to use them (for example) as narrators and empathize with the player. To solve this issue I came up with the idea of using drawings. The our main character’s obsession was the feeling of guilt about a little girl that also provoked a feeling of tenderness towards her. The solution was a childlike drawing she made which could be seen floating in the scenarios of the game and represented a promise she made.

Irregular and curvy traces of that drawing would help to give a more personal aesthetic to the art of the game. Also, the simple, rough and poorly articulated human shape portrayed in that painting would help to make the characters easier to remember for the player.

Some other interesting characters I created aside of the main protagonist:

The giant: His huge and heavy figure illustrates the tense relationship between the main characters but also represents the huge burden of guilt our protagonist carries.

The shadow: The big enemy of the game, the inner evil, the gnawing resentment of the character.

Minions: The addition of this kind of enemy as inanimate spheres was hard for me. In spite of being a subdued game, it still needed of some kind of conflict and threat in certain moments as a way of raising tension in the plot.

Gameplay.

We had a clear vision in our minds about Coma: It was going to be a contemplative game in which the real protagonists would be the surroundings you walk through. We avoided creating complex gameplay with tons of options since it would only serve to distract the player from what we wanted to achieve. I remember long discussions with my partner about trying to improve the mechanics and puzzles. Although the gameplay was one of the first points we defined, it went through some modifications as the creative aspect of the game evolved.

A clear example of how we changed the gameplay can be seen in the puzzle found in the sea where some mirrors are used to reflect light (yes, I’m a fan of the classics). My idea helped my partner realize the importance of this the puzzle and also defined our final goal. I suggested that the exit of the level could be buried under seaweed which, in turn, could be disintegrated when dried up by combining all the light rays. That way I felt I was giving coherence to the concept of an oceanic environment.

Art and environmental design.

Describing all the art goes beyond the scope of this post mortem. In short, however, I can say that we created concept art to use in the design of certain environments and to evaluate which kind of atmosphere was needed for the game.

Concept art I created for one of the environments.

Basically, our intention was to integrate surrealism and melancholy into a realistic landscape, in which each detail, colour or shape was influenced by the experiences the main character collected when he was awake.

Artists such as Dalí, Van Gogh and Monet were good references. I will also mention two other key influences for this project: nature itself and the aforementioned childlike illustrations.

Sky designs and textures.

Sky designs had great importance for the artistic vision in Coma. Since we worked with large, flat, open and at the same time minimalistic environments, great effort was put into making the game look spectacular. This heavily relied on the quality of the art for the sky designs. I had particular difficulties with adapting the textures to the skybox since I wanted to create something with a strong visual appeal; something that would be physically impossible but at the same time looked realistic to the player.

We created some basic textures to test in the game. The idea was then to change them step by step while increasing their quality.

Skybox samples I did.

Environments.

An example environment are the ruins in the sea. This environment was originally created only with the intent to simulate reflections. Then, we finished the level design by following the requirements posed by the  story and that choice also helped to improve the overall mechanics of the game in the end as well.

I imagined that in the past it was a beautiful temple dedicated to the cult of good memories. However, somehow the temple got submerged into the sea. The sea acted as a simile for the main character’s attitude. The guilt he feels materializes in a huge wound (hole) that started emptying the sea, leaving the ruins uncovered. This would allow the use of reflections as well as create a significant contrast between the ruins suffering from erosion and the reflections representing better times.

Another example of how the script influences the creation of environments in an unexpected way is the “limbo” stage found almost at the beginning of the game. Based on the tunnel of light as described by many people who awoke from a coma or who had a near-death experience, this is a place illustrating self-insight. This is why I decided that the trip should start there and in this particular way. It is the perfect environment to introduce the player to a world full of possibilities. I designed it as a dark and anguished place, a place that makes the player want to escape. The big tree (the final goal of the game) also had to be present. Modelling the inner mind as roots is the reason for the organic shape of the road.

Concept art I did of the path in limbo

Here, I had the idea of having the player choose between two paths, one of them being the incorrect and misleading one. My intention was to underline the false feeling of freedom we wanted to communicate through the different environments. Also, this goes hand in hand with the game’s story being  dependant on the player’s decisions.

What I’ve been describing here are only a few illustrative examples of the different problems we faced during the game’s development.

The core message I wanted to deliver with this post-mortem is “individual and rushed decisions can have negative consequences for the whole project”.

Clear examples of this can be found whenever we created elements that were hard to integrate into the context of the game (such as the time we designed an environment based on circular platforms which we were then forced to disguise as floating rocks, wasting a lot of time).

Future plans.

In a project like this future plans are usually reduced to working every day and solving the problems as they appear. The idea was to not worry a lot about the future until we judge see how the game fared on PC. However, I had a hunch about Virtual Reality. When the Oculus Rift was presented, I got excited about the prospect and immediately its the potential. For me, a game like Coma looked like it was designed for this kind of experience. Sadly, my partner Carlos didn’t have the same opinion and we scrapped the idea.

So, what happened to Coma? (Clue)

As we reach this point, there are many more things I would like to say and clarify but in the end the focus of this article is the game. Maybe you have the feeling that you have already seen some of the elements (art, story and design concepts) in another video game - that may very well be true. That is why I stress that, in my personal experience, it is essential to have a team you can trust if you want a clean start in this industry. Especially if you are not part of a big company, don’t have an existing infrastructure to rely on and legal issues are something new to you, there is no lifeguard in case of a shipwreck.

This project, like many a good story, has ended with a dramatic final plot twist that makes me notice my big mistake in Coma. When you start talking about business models, investors, etc., it is essential to protect absolutely all your work legally. Regardless whether you are working with friends or not, you simply cannot predict how they will react when they see too many possibilities on the horizon. In spite of having signed tons of agreements they might believe that by merely changing some images and some small details they’re creating (and publishing) a new game. But collective work including all the people who significantly influenced in its development.

This resulted in months of negotiations with my only intention to resolve the situation without any damage to a game that has a lot of work for our part. But it has has been useless, because the other part was already a slave of his rushed decisions.

Like I said at the beginning of this article this whole adventure, until the very end, retains an eerie similarity to the game itself. Every mistake you make carries its own consequences. Yet, they don’t always have to be negative. I want to believe that my work will stay alive and that it has served some purpose. If in the end it reaches the audience of other projects, I still hope they will enjoy it, even if they don’t know its origins. Above all I want to reiterate that I learned some valuable lessons that I will apply in future projects.

Hope my experience will be useful to you. Thanks everyone.

Dani Navarro

@playerDNG

Everything explained and showcased in this article belongs to the video game project COMA: a mind adventure. All the illustrations have been created by Dani Navarro.

Translation: Jesús Fabre 

Reviewers: Manuela Meyer and Jan Milewski