Hour of Yōkai

The History of Hour of Yōkai

Initially, Hour of Yōkai started as a game pitch in George Brown College’s Game Design Graduate Program. Prompted with the theme “sacrifices must be made”, our group decided on a puzzle adventure in which your items can only be used once and consume your energy, making every decision a potential sacrifice. If you use a specific item here, you may not have it for another more beneficial opportunity ahead or you may not have enough energy to proceed. Alongside our pitch I created a “demo” of the game through the narrative and item use perspective, as no one in our group had coding capabilities to make an actual demo. This demo was to capture the charm of the yōkai, the item usage, the HP meter, and the branching pathways. While our vision was to have more exploration for the player to move back and forth before committing to specific actions, for the twine demo it remained more of a linear Choose Your Own Adventure experience. Hour of Yōkai’s original demo can be seen here.

We were greenlit the following day and our group went into production, with myself leading as Creative Director and Narrative Lead as the theming and the yōkai lore were my expertise. A few changes were made - Tama’s HP system - originally a clock, hence the clock in the logo - was changed to an energy meter. This was done for more thematic sense, in that passing from one level to another would give Tama more energy, which made more sense than filling up Tama’s timer. We originally wanted the tutorial and first level to be completed at the end of our second semester, but due to time constraints and scope decided it would be best to make a slightly longer tutorial level than rush two levels and make them weaker.

Hour of Yōkai as a Thesis

As the story and theme of Hour of Yōkai was entirely my own, I decided to continue working on this project as my thesis. However, I took the gameplay in a different direction. During production of our prototype I felt the genre and playstyle we were developing was not the best way of telling Tama’s story. Instead I want to focus on a visual novel.

I created an example of the flow when talking to an NPC for a character study using Twine, which can be viewed here.