About
Stalin is dead, Khrushchev is gone. What happened on one of the last flights to Moscow in 1965? Slip into the role of Elizaveta Syomina and test your investigative skills and solve a meticulously crafted mystery. Explore a 3D replication of the Tupolev TU-114, a Soviet passenger plane full of historical artifacts and characters, just waiting to be discovered. Gather clues, talk with the passengers and use the logic system to uncover the hidden truth. Can you find out what really happened on this breathtaking flight?
Explore a 3D replication of the Tupolev TU-114, a Soviet passenger plane full of historical artifacts and characters, just waiting to be discovered. Gather clues, talk with the passengers and use the logic system to uncover the hidden truth. Can you find out what really happened on this breathtaking flight?
Reflection
A Breathtaking Flight was one of the first bigger collaborative projects I worked on in university and I decided to highlight it here for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it was a fun combination of design and narrative coming together. We had to both build a historical mystery as well as a deduction system and investigation system to go with it. Speaking to witnesses, gathering clues and combining ideas together to point out contradictions and unlock new dialogue worked flawlessly and was super fun to build up. We ended up with a huge design doc and an even bigger story document.
This was also the game where I learned how much the little things mattered. To make a mystery game is to hide information and ideas in plain sight and to make a game set in a specific historical moment also meant to incorporate this meaningfully. We filled the game with lots of “fluff” - dialogue and interactions that was entirely optional and helped ground the story and tell the player more about the place they were in. There is an aspect where this can muddle the message and I definitely learned this lesson here too. This is why in our current game, Fey, I’ve made a specific effort to make those little fluff lines worthwhile and entertaining on their own.
Though, more than anything else, despite this game being close to theoretical content completion we never got it out the door. And the biggest hurdle there was polish. This project really showed how true it is that the last 10% are 90% of the work. You cannot underestimate the impact the tools can be (we used a catastrophic dialogue system at the time) and how much additional work it really is to make all the little things feel good, from animations to getting rid of little bugs to ironing out little inconsistencies. The studies and projects continued and it fell by the wayside and in hindsight I see more and more problems but I’ve learned a lot of lessons here too.
You can take a look at a gameplay video here. No doubt you’ll see plenty of the rough edges. Still, considering how young and inexperienced we were it was a great accomplishment and a huge learning experience.
Genre: First-person Detective-Adventure
Team
Álvaro Quinteros, Jan Maslov, Giovanni Tagliamonte, Eduard Gotwig, Tim Gleibs
The project was built as part of my BA studies at the Cologne Game Lab of the University of Applied Sciences, Cologne.