Behind The Park - Part 1
In the previous Behind the Scenes series, we looked at how the scenes of the game (or “memories”) were made.
In this new two-part series, we will focus on the making of the other half of Wednesdays: Orco Park.
Before the Park
As I explained in this newsletter, Orco Park is a fictional theme park management video game from the 90s. In the “park” sections of the game, you play as Timothée playing Orco Park as an adult and thus retrieving earlier memories.
But did you know Orco Park almost got cut at some point?
Weirdly, the idea of using a theme park management game to deal with the topic of child abuse has always been there. It was already there in My first Video Game, a small interactive fiction I wrote back in 2020 that would become the blueprint for Wednesdays.
It was still there in 2022 in the very first presentation i did for Wednesdays in order to obtain a writer grant from the FAJV (French public video game fund).
However, there was a point during pre-production when this idea totally disappeared. I thought it would be too weird. Too costly, too. I thought that, for once, maybe I should take the easy road, go for something a bit duller but easier to make, to understand, and maybe to sell.
So I came up with another design: instead of a park, the “hub” would be a cluttered desk, Timothée’s desk. The player, playing Timothée, would be able to inspect the items one by one and access memories from them.
Here’s a mockup I made back then:
This design sure was less fun and “out there” than the park, but it had its advantage too: the link between the items and memories would probably be clearer for the players, and some items could bring additional information to help understanding the story, a school year group photo or a family tree for instance.
So this is the design I approached our soon to be publisher ARTE with.
ARTE showed some interest for the game, thought it could fit well their catalogue, and trusted us to be able to pull it off (Florent and I already worked on a previous touchy project with ARTE: Bury Me My Love).
They still had a doubt though: Wasn’t the desk part a bit… bland?
WAIT! I’VE GOT SOMETHING ELSE!
I dug the park up from the trash can, pitched it, and that’s how we got our design, and publisher.
Building the park
Back in 2022, before I gave up and then came back on the park idea, I had made a fist prototype on Adventure Game Studio. Adventure Game Studio is a game development tool designed to make point & click adventures. It’s not really suited for a park management game (even a fake one), but it’s the tool I am the most comfortable with, and back then, making the game all alone, including art and programming, was still a very likely option.
Here’s a demo that has been recorded back then if you want to see what it could have looked like:
As you can see, the design was still very close to Theme Park back then.
The idea of an insular park came later, when I realized a big empty zone to build on wouldn’t be very pretty to look at. Plus : building an island would force the rides to be built next to each other and potentially allow us to skip roads. Roads are ugly. And scary from a technical standpoint.
We had secured pre-production money from ARTE, the project was getting real, it was time for Chris to code the first prototype in Unity. At first, the terraforming was a bit… messy, but Chris eventually managed to make it work:
(Don’t ask me why Phoenix Wright had replaced the advisor. I’m not even sure myself. I think I was just playing Ace Attorney back then)
We now had a working unity prototype. We then needed art and music… And that’s what we’ll cover in our next newsletter! Stay tuned! Subscribe to the newsletter. Share it. Buy/play the game if you haven’t. You know the drill.