Available for free, now on Steam!
Project
Halfway Home is a Visual Novel Stat Management Game, about recovery, mental health, and time. It was a primarily 2 person team, between myself and John Myres as our Senior Year project at DigiPen Institute of Technology.
It is a heavily narrative based project. The player controls a resident at this halfway home (default name is Sam), who is set to leave in 1 week. Upon meeting the new resident Timothy, at the week begins, Sam sets out on a seemingly uneventful final week. But when strange outcomes occur, and Sam ends the week waking up at its beginning again and again, its up to them to hunt down the mysterious of their final week, and break the Time Loop.
Context
John and I acted as a partnership developing this game. Neither of us took sole ownership of any particular aspect of the narrative development, though our differing strengths did appear in the many, non-narrative aspects of the production. John, Primarily focused on the UI/UX, where as I handled more the technical and systematic sides of the game. The game’s mechanics, the flow of time, the stats, as well as the systems for character sprites to appear, and how text was displayed, where all made by me.
In the Narrative, John and I worked in conjunction, planning, designing, and eventually, writing out, the game’s many narrative scenes. We used Ink, as our medium for writing the narrative in. We had several Ink files, all connected in a unique quilt-work of our Timeline System. The player would go to the map, make a location choice, and, if that location at that location was pinned in our Timeline, a unique scene would play.
Accomplishments
- Developed Schedule Editor, for controlling how character appear on the map screen
- Developed Timeline System, and Editor, for controlling flow of game modes and the time management mechanics.
- Created Stat System, and its interactions with game flow.
- Co-wrote the game with John Myres
Jesse Lozano 