Connect

About Connect

Connect is not very a traditional video game.
It is a single player cross-platform experience between computer and phone.

In Connect the player follows a maintenance worker undertaking during a nighttime job at the company owning and controlling all the personal information in the world; Connect. It’s supposed to be an easy job, in and out of the building in a few minutes. But nothing ever really goes according to plan, or… does it?

What did I do?

During this project I have primarily been doing gameplay design and writing, but I also contributed with a few scripts.

The Gameplay Design

We decided on a madman’s idea: To play a single game across both phone and computer, we needed some solid use for the phone. We chose to use it as a communication and interaction medium. As the game is mainly a narrative given game, the only real things the character in the world could do was to walk around, interact and maybe access some journal of some kind. To make the phone a more central piece during gameplay, we opted to let the phone have all those features, with the exception of moving around in the world.

As everything in the world was supposed to be connected, everything was accessed with your phone. A locked door? The elevator? Household appliances? All controlled with a press of a button in the connect app. Even the calls are logged for your convenience™. Gameplay wise, this meant that all the door opening, elevator riding and logs of the phone calls you have received were all accessed with the phone, which made for great immersion.

The Writing

During the project it became obvious that due to the cryptic nature of the game we needed good writing to convey the story. I was part of  the group that wrote the dialogue and continuously improved on it as we received feedback. We strived to keep it as mysterious as we could to keep the player in guessing without making the basic plot too hard to follow.

To bring it all alive we had to use voice acting, as text-to-speech would not have cut it for the purposes of keeping the player immersed. It all ended up working very well as we used the phone to play the various pieces of dialogue to imitate a real phone call.