melanie – documentation (in progress)

Holy late post, Batman.

Soul Searching is a game about soul searching, delivering the metaphor through maze navigation.

The project spawned from a story idea I had long ago, of a person whose soul was shattered into multiple pieces. The original form was lost and is now trying to return to the person, collecting its fragments along the way. The gameplay focuses on maze navigation, but you can’t see the entire maze at one time.

I took much inspiration from the games I’ve played: Dear Esther, Sense of Connectedness, Thomas Was Alone, etc. I wanted to create something familiar (maze solving) while presenting it in an unfamiliar way.

Technicalities-wise, I took much of it from algorithms online and programs people already wrote on openprocessing; there’s practically an entire culture out there that obsesses over maze generation, trying to figure out the best way to generate mazes, already making creative games with it, and diverging from traditional mazes.

Unfortunately, the program is suffering from a big bug for the moment. I’ve been trying to rat it out for the past several days. It’s slow going and I feel really bad that I don’t have much to show because of that stupid bug. Needless to say I’ll still be working on this throughout the break until I finish it because I’ve spent too much time on it to stop. Proper documentation will go up once it’s done. Sorry!