Game Overview
Melancholy Inheritance
Memories come in many forms, including material ones. Observing the life of an elderly artist who is passionate about restoring paintings, you try to preserve the memory of immortal art and, most importantly, the protagonist’s family.
In this game, you’ll experience the process of art conservation and observe the protagonist’s life. You explore a large estate and attempt to reconstruct memories of the past to uncover the reasons for the protagonist’s loneliness.
The player’s interpretation of the story depends entirely on their personal interest and their perspective on intergenerational relationships, which is the primary focus of the narrative.
• Genre & Platform
Hybrid VN (Visual Novel – adventure style), Mystery, Drama.
Platform: Unity/Unreal Engine
• Target Audience
Adult gamers aged 20–40, interested in art games, narrative experiments, and introspective experiences. These are people with a creative background who value visual aesthetics and symbolism, and who will find the game interesting as a space for theories, discussions, and dialogue between the work and the reader.
• Design Intention / Essential Experience
The design intention behind “Melancholy Inheritance” is experimentation with the concept of visual novels, trying to move farther from the concept of just plain text accompanied by visuals. This game is supposed to highly value the visual communication, cross-play of game interaction, and novelty.
• Game Design Pillars
The game’s primary intention is to immerse the player in a setting they find difficult to identify with, while still finding a point of empathy. To support this, the three main pillars are:
Melancholy – as the driving emotion, which builds aesthetics.
Memories sequence – the way of telling a narrative is a journey through the history of the main character, to slowly uncover the plot.Unconscious interaction – to provide better interactivity, the end of the game is supposed to influence not only basic choices during story time, but also the behaviour of the player itself. How attentive they are to details, which visual elemnts catches their attention – subtly, it should influence their income.
Art and Visuals – to support the story, the close attention to how art influence on space in the game works as a way to build the immersion feeliing.
• Core Values/Keys
Metaphors and Experience:
•Memories translated through objects.
•Relationship between making (something) and future experience aka “reap the benefits” or “face with consequences.”
•Actions stayed and were kept by our mind
•Art keeps memories
So the main goal is a relation of:
•art and the way people reflect it;
•propose art as “conservation” of memory and emotions.
•provide specific experience of deep considerations, and let the player feel “melancholy” related to something they haven’t experienced in real life yet.ords/To