The Life of Max

About

‘The Life of Max’ was a interactive narrative idea by a friend Mark Gregory aimed at mobile market similar to ‘Florence’. The story followed the life a family of four through the eyes of their newly adopted puppy ‘Max’ allowing the player to interact with the environment from the perspective of a dog and affecting small aspects of the narrative outcomes with their presence and actions helping individual family members.

Role

Being the only one familiar with Unity in the team I implemented all the sound, images, animations and interactions for the game provided by the very talented team Mark had brought together. For this I built from scratch several simple interaction types to trigger animations, scene transitions and a mechanic that was later dropped of the idea that the scenes are pictures in a book. To this end the game camera did not see the scene but a separate camera did and was rendering to the photo on display, I choose this option to allow touch presses based on the game camera to respond correctly to the scene.

Each scene would have several interactive elements that the player could use to explore the story further through advancing the story or narrative clues to the characters backgrounds and state of mind.

With a limited scope for the player to interact through a mobile screen I only needed to design simple lampshades to direct the player towards areas that could be interacted with to advance the story.