Stay

«Stay» is an experimental 3D Visual Novel I created for my BA thesis. For my graduation I wanted create something that reflected my various design interests. It incorporates my love for typography, music composition, game design, and writing. As my research goal (it still was an academic project) I explored typography in video games twofold: Is there another way to display speech than as flat subtitles, and could custom typography be used to portrait character emotions more effectively.

Put bluntly I attached the text to the speakers and displayed it inside the game world. This little change had quite an interesting effect. Players couldn’t simply zone out while reading as they needed to walk at the same time and frame the conversation with the camera. Similar to a regular conversation in the game the players had to face their conversation partner—a choice, that often is not made mendatory to understand voiced dialog or taken away when dialog plays in a form of cut-scene.

The game was created in Unreal 5 engine, and for the characters I used the Metahuman creator. The custom dialog manager was done by Lewin and percussions for the music were contributed by Benny.

The game can be downloaded for free at itch.io.

A more comprehensive documentation can be found here. There is also a nice accompanying riso-printed book.