Creating the Expositional Intro: Part 1

Despite the obscurity, we do in fact have an explanation for why there are pink-slime-controlled enemies scattered around the city. However, communicating it has proven to be a bit of a challenge.

We knew that an introduction cutscene would be important in establishing some rules about the world, what the threat is exactly that the player is fighting, why they care. We wanted to fit that into a short, concise but gripping intro which proved to be more of a challenge than anticipated. Thus, the first pass:

Expanding on our themes of technology and youth, the first idea we had for displaying all the expositional information was through a phone screen. This way, we could touch on many things through showing different apps. The news will inform us about the slime situation, and then a messaging app can introduce us to our characters.

In practice… we found this didn’t quite match the energy that we wanted to introduce our game with. The single still phone frame was too static and there was too much information to be told through text alone if we wanted to keep it short.

So, we move on! We learned more about what we needed to say through this intro, how we should say it, and we took that with us when conceptualizing our intro video idea number 2.

More on that in Part 2...

- Naomi Masterson