Don't Forget

Don't Forget is a 3D singleplayer story and exploration game inspired by dementia.
Recollect your memories by looking for clues and playing brain-stimulating minigames whilst battling the effects of your dementia. Piece together the story and don't forget...

The game features a visually appealing scrapbook-like art style, which enhances the nostalgic atmosphere of the game as the character reminisces on his life. The combination of hand-drawn elements, scanned textures and paper-like effects creates a unique and charming aesthetic that complements the theme of memory collection.

Your journey begins as you wake up in a vaguely familiar place with only a journal at your side. You don't know how you got here but maybe retracing your steps will help? Your journal is an anchor in guiding you through several spaces filled with fragments of your past.

In order to understand what is happening to you and why, you need to explore three areas linked to your past and fill your journal with recovered memories by playing brain games.

Battle the effects of your illness and beware of its implications. As your journey continues, your perception of reality gets increasingly distorted. Dementia is not something you can control and this will be reflected the longer you linger in both the narrative and gameplay.

We wanted to convey a collage effect in our game. To achieve this, we decided to paint the textures for all the objects that the player can pick up by hand, preserving all details and grain of traditional media. To texture the interactive props, we printed the UVs of the models on paper, and hand-painted the props with traditional media. For the first zone, we textured the props with Copic markers and colored pencils, staying in the bright, warm saturated tones. For the second zone, we used watercolors in the blue and cold tones, and for the last zone, we used watercolors in greyscale. We then scanned the textures and made some final adjustments in Adobe Photoshop. After that we were finally able to add the textures to the models.

To speed up development, we chose to replicate the hand-painted feeling for the textures on all models that the player cannot pick up. For the first area we created a shader in Substance Designer by combining various images that resemble charcoal or pencil marks. The images serve as texture maps that give the shader a hand-drawn appearance. If suitable images were not available or did not achieve the desired effect, we generated own pencil textures within Substance Designer by adjusting a few parameters. This involved manipulating values such as contract, noise and blending modes to simulate the look of pencil strokes or charcoal smudges.
By fine-tuning these settings, we were able to create a customized texture that meets our specific artistic requirements.

To achieve the watercolor look for the second area, we started by creating several black-and-white textures in Adobe Photoshop using a watercolor brush. These textures simulate the natural, fluid appearance of watercolor paint. After creating a few different variants, we imported them into Substance Painter. In Substance Painter, we combined these variants to develop a comprehensive watercolor-like texture. To add further flexibility, we exposed parameters that allow for the adjustment of the Hue, Saturation and Lightness (HSL) of the texture. This way, we could easily tweak the colors to suit our needs without altering the underlying texture.

Keeping in theme with memory loss, the main character had to look as if it was missing from the game, like it was cut out of the picture. The technology to make this happen consists out of two parts, the background and the character itself.

To create the flat, non-shaded crosshatched background, a plane was placed just in front of the camera that covered the whole viewport. In its custom shader, the depth value is set to the lowest possible value, which renders the plane behind every other object in the scene. The shader then applies a crosshatching texture to that plane using the screen space coordinates as UV-coordinates.

The main character has two custom shaders to create the desired 'cutout' effect. The first shader uses the stencil buffer to mark which pixels on the screen make up the character and the second shader applies the same texture as the background to the marked pixels, thus giving the effect of a cutout. This texture is again applied using the screen space coordinates as UV-coordinates to achieve the flag, non-shaded look.

To elevate the experience of playing Don't Forget to the highest level, we collaborated with a poet, a composer and multiple people that were willing to translate our game.
Once our game launches on steam, our game will be available in 6 languages: English, Dutch (by Robbe Mahieu), Spanish (by Effy Camacho), French (by Aurélie Poinsot), Italian (by Xhon Laze) and Russian (by Nina Krutkytė).

Both our composer (Frédérique Le Duc-Moreau) and our poet (Eve McIntosh) wanted to share their experiences of working on this project:

Eve McIntosh (@devilfruitpoems):
Writing poems for Don’t Forget was an absolutely surreal experience for me, as my work has otherwise only been featured in student magazines and journalistic articles - and this new medium of showcasing my poetry through an extremely visual video game story was extremely rewarding. My poetic style is equally visual, and translating that into the narrative of Don’t Forget was exciting, especially in poems where I could build on the world around the player; such as the one scribed on his CD or the one on the outside of his pharmacy paper bag. The development team were so focused on getting the aspects of developing dementia right, and had done thorough research into its gradual symptoms which were incorporated into the game, and this also took shape in the corresponding poems. I feel so lucky to have been involved in such a worthwhile project, and really do think my poems add another effective layer to the content of the game!

Frédérique Le Duc-Moreau:
The music in Don't Forget aims to add depth to the game's storytelling by supporting its universe and the main character's advancing dementia. As forgotten memories resurface, the music becomes more confused and emotional. The composition was primarily inspired by the game's beautiful craftsmanship and thoughtful design. Beginning in a cozy, warmhearted environment, the music is initially presented as an old, comforting piano song. As the story progresses to colder, darker settings, these elements are mirrored in the composition, which deconstructs the main theme in new somber and nostalgic ways.

Composing music for the game Don't Forget was a truly rewarding experience. It enhanced my ability to create a musical universe and tell stories through my craft. The game's strong narrative and purpose inspired me, and I aimed to capture that in my compositions. I'm incredibly proud of the result, and it was a pleasure to collaborate with such an amazing team on this beautiful and well-thought-out game.

Our game is currently available on itch.io

The game will launch on steam on the 4th of June 2024. The game is now wishlistable!

Full Credits: