Title: “Backchat“

Genre: Visual Novel/ Puzzle

Platform: PC

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Concept & USP

The core idea behind Backchat is that of a visual novel game with dialogue that plays out continuously in real-time, with players needing to manually craft responses to NPCs while characters are actively in conversation; adding a sense of tension to what is often made out to be a relaxing and simple game genre.

In terms of narrative, I wish for the game to explicitly tackle the subject of ASD (autism spectrum disorder) and importantly navigating social situations as an autistic person. The puzzle-style gameplay should be engineered to reflect this: not to act as an emulation of ASD conversation but rather as a means of abstractly portraying the communicational/ conversational challenges of an individual with ASD.

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Design Intention

“I would like players to understand and relate to the tension of socialising as an autistic child by creating an interactive story using the medium of video games.”

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Target Audience

I intend for my game’s target audience to be from a mixture of 2 core backgrounds: firstly, neurodivergent people who show intrigue because they can relate to the subject matter – I would expect this group to mostly be made up of teens and young adults – and secondly, a more general audience of gamers who have a background of enjoying visual-novel style content and/or puzzle game content.

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Game Design Pillars

I have abstracted my game concept into three core game pillars that I intend to build my project around. They are as follows:

• Convey Real-World Challenges through Mechanics

A large part of why I want to create this game is to make people more aware of the ways in which autistic children can struggle with social communication. I feel that taking advantage of storytelling through game mechanics is the most effective way to do this.

• Create a Fun and Engaging Narrative

I want to develop a story that will keep players captivated and engaged with my game – due to the focus on struggles with social communication it makes sense for me to focus on having a strong character-centric story as a primary reason to maintain player interest.

• Explore Usage of Colour in Storytelling

My game will be exploring emotions quite heavily, and I have become interested in how colour imagery can be inherently linked with emotions. For this reason I want to try and enhance my storytelling in the game by making colour imagery a large part of the art style and game as a whole.