Synopsis: You are a BJD who gains sentience. You remember your owner painstakingly sculpting you, spending hours scraping at your body to perfect you, braiding your hair. When you gained sentience, your hair fell out, and you are determined to discover who you are without the influence of your owner.
Media Inspirations:
- Metaphor Re:fantazio (Fantasical look, Music)
- Roblox (Death explosion mechanic and respawning)
- Sifu (Age mechanic; every time you die, there are new perks and debuffs)
Why this idea?
Since I was learning about Animism in the BJD community (which I have been dipping my toes in more recently!), I wanted to explore the idea of your object of affection not returning the feeling. Movies like Toy Story have explored more of animism too, but I think it can be turned into a dark twist when your owner thinks they know more than you yourself. Similar to the idea, this can invoke feelings of stress and lost agency.
Main Features
- Escape your owner, find the outside world
- Find any other dolls and free them; they can be your companions
- Find scraps of hair to reveal flashbacks about your past
- Use the parts of fallen dolls to your advantage, such as taking the legs from taller dolls to run faster
- Death like Roblox (explosion into parts + respawn), suggesting your owner has remade you but slightly different (inspo from Sifu and the ageing perks and debuffs mechanic)
Moodboard
The images represent the eloquent nature of BJDs and their many variants. The handcrafted nature of them is shown, with all of the details and accessories. The player will start as a blank slate, but will be transformed throughout their journey and the sacrifices of others/ their predecessors.
Some of the forms you could be in this game:
- Mermaid
- Spider
- Animal (hind legs)
Concept Sketches
Program: Paint Tool Sai 2
For the concept sketch of this character, I wanted to explore what vibe the doll could have. I made a bunch of different faces before settling on the final one. The first face was very stylised; I took a lot of inspiration from Pidgin Dolls and their sharp features. In the next few faces, I went in the opposite direction. They were more “anime” like, with round, softened features. At this point, I realised I wanted a balance between the two, so I opted for a stylised semi-realistic appearance for the character.
Once I was happy with the face, I shaded it and saw how it would look more 3D and exported it so it could be used for my Blender sculpt.
3D Prototype process – Blender Sculpt
1st Sculpt
My first attempt at the body was a blockout where I used subdivided cubes and spheres to create a decent body shape. However, the main problem I encountered was that when I remeshed the entire body to prepare it for sculpting, everything merged into one. I managed to fix a it a little bit, but I wasn’t that happy with the outcome. As a result, I restarted the entire process.
2nd Sculpt
This sculpt was much better than the last. I learnt from last time to separate the parts so each major part (face, torso, arms, joints, thighs, calves and feet) was modelled separately with the mirror modifier. This made it easy to do both parts at once, since there were many.
I smoothed out the parts using remesh and the smooth brush in sculpting mode. The remesh + boolean union trick was a new thing I learnt from this sculpt. It allows any additional objects you’ve put onto your mesh to be joined together and smoothed out, meaning you can easily sculpt from there onward. Getting the hip and glutes to look decent was a pain, but I eventually managed to make it look connected to the torso.
Final Model
The final model shows how the character could look; however, since this was my first time making a BJD in Blender, it is not exactly how I would want it to be. I unfortunately couldn’t sculpt the joint holes without there being complications in the mesh. Regardless of that, I still managed to rig it and stimulate the owner, posing and playing with it for fun before it gains sentience!
Essential Experience
The game concepts are based on Trauma, Community and/or Aestheticism. Therefore, the essential experience will learn towards one of these with each idea. This idea leans into Aestheticism.
- What experience do I want the player to have?
- I want the player to feel like they have no agency at first
- I want the player to feel curious about the outside world, their character’s goals as well
- I want the player to feel threatened by the creator and the urge to take them down
- What is essential to that experience?
- The ever-present threat of the owner finding you
- The promise of the outside and how you can find community
- The helpless feeling of being so small
- How can my game capture that essence?
- Atmospheric music and background
- Restrictions due to size and status (doll) – when the owner catches you, they coddle you
- Scale – objects being really big and hard to reach
Gameplay Loop
- The game starts with a cutscene sequence of the owner finishing sculpting you. When they are finally done dressing you up and polishing you, the owner then gives you a soul, in a ritual like the Build-A-Bear stuffing one.
- You “wake up” and feel all the pain – your hair begins to fall out from the stress. The owner, distressed by this, places you on their bedroom window perch and leaves the room to collect another hair bundle. Your journey begins here.
- Avoid being detected by the creator, hide behind walls and objects, and evade obstacles.
- Your health meter is very important – if you get hit by something, it goes down,
- There is also a detection meter; avoid being caught, or you will lose health
- Game Over: Losing health fully 3 times causes permanent death. However, your character will remember their past life and have perks and debuffs attached to this.
- Game Win: when you successfully find a way out, with a cutscene playing
Audience
This game’s target audience is for people who enjoy fast, impactful gameplay, like It Takes Two, but also an atmospheric background like Little Nightmares. The game would ideally also be similar to Modern Atlus games: Persona 5 and Metaphor Re: Fantazio come to mind with the JRPG dungeon crawler aspect. I want there to be some psychological horror-ish elements, but not too much, as I am not the biggest fan of horror in its entirety. However, I love elements of playing on the psyche, so fans of that will enjoy this game too.
- Fantasy violence, not too graphic but may depict blood or broken bones
- May have some sexual innuendos
- Strong threats and dread
| Pros | Cons |
| – Cool idea based on ideas on Animism (e.g Toy Story), touches on fate and determinism too – Face-paced 3D puzzle platformer!! – Artstyle based on anime-style BJDS, stylised | – Very big scope for a game, not viable for a 20-minute gameplay. Therefore, I don’t see myself making this game this year. It’s something that could be scoped down hypothetically, but it would probably lose a lot of the charm. – Need to flesh out the story more, motives for the doll escaping – Need to navigate how to touch on heavy themes while not going too dark |