CONTROLS

This game should be played with headphones, as music is an important part of the overall atmosphere!

• Move with WASD keys (ZQSD for French keyboards) or arrow keys
  
  • This also allows you to select dialogue options when prompted
• Look around with your mouse pointer
• Interact with objects (when prompted) using the F key
• Skip through dialogue using Spacebar, F or left mouse click
  • Select dialogue option (when prompted) using the F key or Spacebar

REFERENCES

Most of the in-game assets were created using basic 3D shapes within Unity (I have no knowledge whatsoever in 3D modeling), however I have used a couple of sprites, models and of course, music, all under some variation of the Creative Commons liscencing. Below are the authors:

Music

• Guitar Solo -- https://freesound.org/people/karolist/sounds/370934/
• 2001: A Space Odyssey Theme --  Richard Strauss (original) / Sascha Ende (Wikimedia Commons)
• Techno beat (on the stove) -- Music by ComaStudio from Pixabay
• Seedy Jazz -- Music by ASTROFREQ from Pixabay
• "Look Sharp, Be Sharp" -- Boston Pops, Public domain (Wikimedia Commons)

Models

• PS5 -- https://www.cgtrader.com/studio17
• Bottles -- https://www.cgtrader.com/ed-3d

2D Sprite

• Contactless Icon -- Icons made by LAFS from Flaticon

THE NIGHT BEFORE

"What the hell happened last night?" is a question you may or may not have asked yourself in the past.

Sometimes, you don't even recognize your surroundings upon waking up.

If this is you, then "The Night Before" is a narrative-driven video game which might resonate with you.

If not, "The Night Before" is a "what the f-", narrative-driven video game about someone who's (re)discovering their flat... only the furniture, walls, ceiling... everything feels different.

This is my attempt at narrative humor, inspired by past movies and games I have played (The Big Lebowski - Joel & Ethan Coen, Inherent Vice - Paul Thomas Anderson/Thomas Pynchon, Hotline Miami - Jonatan Söderström, Jazzpunk - Necrophone Games), mixed in with the question: what if the whiskey bottles could speak in Lee Hazlewood's similarly titled (but much more depressing) song?

A remake of the Night Before (2D)

Originally developed as a Bitsy game, which you can find here (https://ikonico.itch.io/the-night-before). I strongly recommend you skim through it  and its itch.io page as some elements are explained differently there.

At the time, I had a lot of difficulty managing Bitsy's wonky conditional dialogue system, and the medium itself forced restrictions in my ideas of game design (which was on purpose).

By doing this with Unity3D and Ink (https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/), things were a lot more manageable, even if it did require quite a bit of integration to get both the engine and the scripting language to communicate effectively.

It's not exactly the same game, as they don't play out the same and the dialogues were re-written from scratch. There are some new characters, some returning, some references to the previous ones.

But what I truly delved into with the 3D version was my first attempt at scene-building, i.e., combining dialogue, music, animations and other effects.

Animations

With a mixture of Unity's Animator and a copious amount of C# Coroutines, as well as using Ink #tags to fire them via dialogue events, I tried to manipulate the the player's experience and focus his attention on specific items on screen.

I'm not sure I managed this entirely, and I feel there might be some details and elements that might be missed entirely.

But that's the thing about details, I suppose!

Music

Originally titled after Lee Hazlewood's "The Night Before", I was unfortunately unable to understand if I could use the song within my game (through "fair use" and non-monetization), and even reached out to the rights-holders, but to no avail.

I wanted to have some sort of correlation between some of the song's lyrics and items you could interact with (like having him say "These empty whiskey bottles, they stand accusing from the floor" in the background while the player finds said whiskey bottles).

In the end, the looping jazz background works well to give the player a sense of "cool mystery" and encourage her/him to explore their surroundings.

Dialogue

When Inkle released 80 Days back in 2014, I instantly loved how they had adapted one of my favorite books from my childhood, Jules Verne's Le Tour Du Monde en 80 Jours onto the mobile phone format.

As a fan of role-playing games (both tabletop and virtual) I also played their 4 chapters of Sorcery! released the year before.

So when I discovered they had developed a scripting language for writing dialogue in video games, and had an integration asset for Unity, I didn't hesitate one second! It truly made my life easier and allowed me to focus more on designing my game rather than developing it efficiently.

Accessibility

My previous game was Feta: Skylines, a game that was more of a "meme" than an actual playable experience, and one of the feelings I came out of its development with was that accessibility was definitely one of its biggest issues.

With no functional UI, over-reliance on key-binds to build anything, it felt like a game created by a hardcore player for hardcore players.

With "The Night Before" I tried to simplify all interactions as much as possible, basically havig only 5 buttons (to move and interact/pass dialogue).

Whether or not it helps in any way, I've yet to find out, but it was a focus point I kept at the back of my mind when developing the game.

Final note

I came out of making "The Night Before" quite proud of the game I had created, because it feels like my first "real" game in the sense that it's a complete experience with a start and finish, as well as a more adequate use of Unity to provide a catered, almost cinema-like experience to the players.

This is always something I have valued in video games: how they sit between litterature, cinema and play. Perhaps there isn't much play in this one, as that's something I focus on with other of my projects (which you can or will find on my itch.io page), but I really did try to implement a snippet of the other two within the video game genre.

"The Night Before" was developed as a coursework assignment for the "Approaches To Play" course at Goldsmiths University (MSc Video Games Programming, 2022/2023)

Thanks for playing!