Hung Out To Dry: A Postmortem
Itch.io Link: https://scarletconcerto.itch.io/hung-out-to-dry
When I first had the idea for this project, I had just finished reading a book about sustainable fashion. It taught me how to think longer-term about my clothing, including how to wash it, store it, repair, recycle and dispose of it sustainably. As a lover of clothes who recently discovered an allergy to non-natural fibres, it got me thinking about taking care of my clothes. I thought about how clothes might feel if they were treated badly or well, and of the things they might have been worn for — in other words, the things they might have seen. I decided that I wanted to try telling a narrative through the ‘eyes’ of clothing.
I spent a while away from my desk, brainstorming ideas in a mind map. I liked the idea of making you care about clothes, so I wondered whether I could tell stories about how the laundry got dirty, or how different items of clothing ended up in a charity shop. Eventually though, I realised that if I wanted the piece to have any emotional weight, I needed to ground it in an overarching narrative — the story of a single character who owns all these items of clothing. The idea of laundry kept the scope too narrow, as it would limit my storytelling to events taking place shortly before the present time. I did like the laundry idea, and as I had already decided on the title of Hung Out to Dry, I did retain the theme, but I reframed it as an introduction to the format of the game.
In the end, I decided to make the story about a young woman choosing an outfit for a date. The clothes in her wardrobe tell the player about themselves and their relationship with the main character, and through these stories you gradually learn more about the character’s values, relationships and tastes. Once you have selected your outfit, I intended for the main character to then tell the player about her feelings towards her outfit.
What went right?
Once I had a general narrative structure, I decided that the best place to start was with art. I didn’t yet know what my character was like, and while I had a couple of ideas for items with interesting backstories, I thought that if I sketched out few items of clothing (my characters) and gave them something close to a character profile, it would begin to help me understand my character, as well as giving me somewhere to start finding my art style. This approach worked very well, giving me a much clearer picture of what I wanted to achieve. I have a fashion illustration reference book which was very useful in working out how to show textures of fabrics. However, it wasn’t all smooth sailing — after working out the first three or four characters, I had used up my initial ideas, and I took to browsing Pinterest and my own wardrobe to find inspiration for more. It was quite a fun process of looking at an item of clothing and imagining what it could tell me about itself and the person who wore it. I wanted these stories to evoke feeling. I also drew some of the clothing on hangers as they would appear in the game, to save myself some work later!
After I had created several characters, and a couple of backgrounds, it was time to start building up the framework for the game. I started by building a short introductory sequence to introduce the player to the concept behind the game — click on clothes and they tell you about themselves, interspersed with dialogue from Estelle, the main character. The game begins with a washing line, and Estelle is taking the clean clothes in. I wanted to make it so that you only progressed when you had taken both items of clothing in, but not linearly — I wanted the player to have the freedom to choose any item of clothing at any time. To achieve this, I had to figure out how to use variables in Fungus. I set Boolean variables called JeansClicked and DressClicked, and set them to True once they had been clicked. Then I set an If statement to check if the jeans AND dress had been clicked before triggering the next dialogue and using LoadScene to move into Scene 2, which is where the rest of the story took place. I used a slightly more complicated version of this setup later on for determining when it was time to progress the story after the player has chosen their outfit as well, using a variety of Boolean valued called XClicked and XChosen.
For me, it was definitely a good choice to work entirely within the Fungus framework. I am not a confident C# programmer, and Fungus enabled me to create the narrative I wanted without too many complications. I learned enough programming to understand variables and conditional statements, so after working out the block names and functions, I was able to create conditional dialogue, events and images.
The simplified visual scripting, especially for a game that is essentially a visual novel, really appealed to me and made it generally easy to troubleshoot, as I could simply follow the flowcharts down to find the problems. I also enjoyed using the Fungus camera system, with commands such as FadeToView and MoveToView to employ a dynamic progression of events, without needing to use animation. In fact, it enabled me to plot out the flowcharts and camera movements for almost the whole game before I finished the art or the dialogue. It was very easy to create blocks for each dialogue pathway without needing to input the actual dialogue until much later. This meant that I could plot out exactly what I needed to go where — a sound effect here, a few lines of dialogue there, a new piece of background art here — and when it came time to actually create the art and the dialogue, I knew what was missing and was able to just concentrate on the creative process, without worrying about implementation.
I also felt like my use of sound effects and music was effective. Without any animations, there is not a coherent sense of space in the game, as the view fades between different locations. By utilising sound effects such as footsteps, phones ringing and the click of a door opening, it helped ground the art in a location, making transitions less jarring.
I used music to enhance the mood of the various locations and scenes. Broadly speaking, there was a different melody for each location (outdoors, bedroom and hallway, although there were different melodies for the two times the player finds themselves in the hallway). In a similar way to the sound effects, it adds a sense of cohesion to each scene.
On top of that, I used the music (all found on freesfx.co.uk — referenced below) to elevate the mood of each scene. The music used in the introductory scene invokes a sense of wistfulness, reminiscent of an afternoon spent in a Studio Ghibli movie, which is the sort of feeling I was aiming to convey through this game. The music whilst you are choosing an outfit and listening to the stories of the clothing is low-key and peaceful; it reminded me of being in a boutique store. Likewise, the music during the phone conversation with your sister is upbeat and cheerful, mirroring her personality as well as the player’s own hopefulness. And finally, the last piece of music, whilst perhaps being a little melodramatic, implies a sense of weight, purpose, and togetherness.
What went wrong?
Originally, my scope was too big. I was imagining a massive, walk in wardrobe full of clothes that could tell you their stories, as well as a narrative that branched significantly depending on your choices of clothing. However, as I progressed in my planning, I realised that I needed to narrow that scope in order to tell a more emotional, focused story, especially if I wanted to complete it to a high standard. I was getting overwhelmed before I even opened Unity, so I decided to simplify.
Instead of offering numerous choices and combinations, I picked six items of clothing which could potentially be worn on a date, and limited the branching narratives to just a few branching dialogue options. Choosing a small number of clothes also made it much easier to programme (and draw) the various possible combinations of clothes.
I created my menus after everything else, first designing the menu on my iPad in Infinite Painter, which is where I created the rest of the art. Then I imported this UI into a scene called MainMenu. The Play button loaded the Intro Scene and this all seemed to be working well. However, I ran into an issue with the End Menu Scene.
Although the End Menu worked fine when I played it directly in the scene, whenever the previous scene (Scene2) tried to call it, it encountered an error and crashed. I debugged by trying LoadScene at every new flowchart through the game until I reached the point after which it gave the error rather than just going to the correct scene. I spent a long time trying to figure out and fix the issue before coming up with a simple workaround: I just copied and pasted everything from the End Menu scene into Scene2, and just sent the camera to the View of the menu, rather than sending it to another scene.
Another problem I encountered was towards the end of the process. I wanted to try building my game to share for playtesting, but I hadn’t realised that I was working in the PC build framework. I switched the build settings, built the game and to my horror, realised that my smooth camera movements had suddenly become jerky and unpleasant. Instead of moving smoothly in both scale and position, the camera now transformed position first, then all in one go, scale. I realised that one thing I hadn’t thought about was that when I was making the game, I was building for PC. However, in order to upload to Itch.io, I needed a html game, so I changed the build to WebGL — and after that, my camera movements went wrong. I suppose that if I had made the game for WebGL in the first place, I would have had the same camera issues earlier on. In any case, as my game is quite a relaxing game, smooth movements were important so I spent some time changing Durations, checking every MoveToView for issues and generally playing around until I realised I couldn’t figure it out by myself. I approached the Fungus Discord server, where I explained the problem and was pointed towards the Tween type. It turned out that changing ‘Ease In And Out Quad’ to ‘Linear’ solved it. While the movement doesn’t look as nice in Linear as it did in Ease In and Out, I think that Ease is heavier on the system, so it doesn’t work as well for WebGL.
What would I like to improve on, or do better next time?
Making Hung Out To Dry was a really enjoyable process. I enjoy constructing narratives, and Fungus felt like an intuitive way to do that. Not everything went exactly according to plan, and I spent many hours on bug fixes, but in the end, I feel like I told the story I set out to, and in a way which resonated with my testers.
I got feedback from colleagues and family as I went through the process of iteration, and I explained my ideas, which led to some organic discussion and even more ideas. My sister and a friend both proofread my dialogue, which was definitely helpful, and by the time I finished the game and passed it on to a slightly wider audience, I got some very positive feedback expressing emotional responses — which were exactly what I wanted to hit with this project.
Going forward, I think that it would be better to be more familiar with the possibilities and limitations of the software I choose to use. Fungus felt very intuitive, but there were times when, especially due to the relative lack of documentation, I found it difficult to solve my issues and if I understood Fungus better, I think I would have created fewer problems for myself.
There are some functionalities which no doubt are not too difficult, but which I have not been able to figure out yet such as customising the dialogue boxes to fit in better with the aesthetic of my game. I would also like to try adding some simple animations to certain events in the game to express things like character expression better. However, I might achieve the same thing with creating a wider variety of portraits. As it is, constrained by time, I limited myself to one portrait of the main character which I customised with outfits, but did not change the expression of.
Audio Sources:
Blume, F., 2021. Flag flapping in wind — ZapSplat — Download free sound effects. [online] ZapSplat — Download free sound effects. Available at: <https://www.zapsplat.com/music/flag-flapping-in-wind/> [Accessed 10 May 2021].
Boyle, D., 2012. Footsteps-Stairs-Wooden-Hollow-05.wav by DWOBoyle. [online] Freesound. Available at: <https://freesound.org/people/DWOBoyle/sounds/152788/> [Accessed 10 May 2021].
Freesfx.co.uk. 2021. Music Tracks. [online] Available at: <https://www.freesfx.co.uk/Category/Music-Tracks/194> [Accessed 10 May 2021].
