Lost Heart

Story-focused adventure game

Engine: Unreal Engine

Team Size: 2

Developed: October 2019 – February 2020

Platform: PC

Lost Heart is a story-focused adventure, where the player controls the office employee Markus, who hates his job. At work, he gets bullied by his boss and coworkers. Markus also suffers from depression and feels emotionless. But through dreams, that reflect the events of the day, he rediscovers his emotions and can improve daily life by using them. Over the course of the story, the player will also learn more about Markus’ past.  The events at daytime are mainly told through cutscenes. During the dreams, platform and hack and slash gameplay is used. This includes jumping, hitting coworkers, smashing objects with a baseball bat and watering plants to grow. Each dream has different mechanics.

For this project, I focused on level design and cutscene creation. Besides, I did visual scripting with Unreal Engine’s Blueprints, contributed to the game concept, and wrote dialogues.

putting gameplay as high as storytelling

The goal for this project was to develop a game that both would have a compelling story, but also provide fun gameplay. Furthermore, the gameplay should support and improve the narrative. Most of the gameplay takes place in Markus’ dreams, where he has to defend himself against coworkers and succeed in platform sections. These selectable dreams are direct representations of events that happened in his life at daytime and represent the respective feeling (anger and love) with different game mechanics. When a night level is beaten by the player, the very same emotion gets unlocked and is used by Markus in the office at day. These unlocks are driving the story forward and are told via cutscenes. Between these sequences, the player still walks around the office, so a small amount of interactivity is still present. This is done to let the player still be a part of the story and engage him as much as possible towards Markus. Moreover, the events in the office are more relaxing and less intense than the dream levels with combat. This enables good pacing between these two sections of the game.

reduction of voice-overs

We decided to forego voice-overs in most of the conversations by the characters. On these occasions, the music is in the focus. This results not only in less work for us but also let the player focus on the most important center part: Markus and his emotions. Since it is all about Markus, it is less important how he is bullied and what is said, but more that he is bullied and how he feels. The respective mood can be well depicted with only music. Since this approach was for us most promising for several occasions, we stuck to that during the whole section of the game, where Markus has not yet regained all emotions. This also works as a theme: Markus is emotionless and does not realize everything and does not “hear” dialogues until the end. In addition to that, we have an interesting contrast from not spoken dialogues to hearable voices at the ending of the game.