Do I Know You? | Edward Tan Portfolio

Do I Know You? is a visual novel about a man visiting his mother with dementia. I worked on it with 2 freelance artists. I wrote and programmed the game in Ren'Py.

Creating the Concept

I wanted to make a game that, rather than using illusion of choice as a stopgap, deliberately uses it to illustrate how sometimes in life, our choices matter not because of how they changed the outcome, but because of how the act of making the choice affects you. I chose dementia as a topic because someone losing their memory emphasizes that the final outcome was the same.

Writing the Story

The beginning of the story is to make the you decide whether or not to go along with her delusions. Choosing to tell her truth might make her uncomfortable, but it increases the chance of finding some closure. Then, you select old mementos from her life to jog her memory. It's an opportunity for the player to learn more about these characters. The game ends with her dying in a hospital and not remembering you. It asks if our choices have meaning despite their futility.

Biggest Success: Direction

What I like most about the final product is that it feels cohesive. The character art and background art fit together, despite being made by separate artists with no communication. The sound design matches the tone of the writing. The emotional beats feel how they're supposed to feel, though not as intense as I had hoped. Even though it's not as good as I envisioned, I did create the game that I initially set out to make.

Biggest Failure: Dialogue

I had such a difficult time trying to write the dialogue. Every time I wrote a line, it came out feeling fake and hollow, because it was. I didn't write this story because I was familiar the subject matter, I wrote it because it was what I needed to execute my core premise. My mom doesn't have dementia, so I had no idea what I was talking about with anything specific that I wrote. By the end, I just cut down every scene to its barest essentials.

Biggest Lesson Learned: Back out of the Corner

By far the biggest delay I had making this game was due to writer's block. When I looked for some advice, it was surprisingly a Tumblr post that had the answer. It said that whenever you get stuck, your problem is usually ten sentences back. Not only did this advice help get me past many stumbling blocks, but thinking about why it works improved my understanding of writing as a process. Writing any sentence you're satisfied with is tough and the possibility of having to redo it is scary, so it's tempting to avoid reviewing your work. But this prevents you from understanding why you're in the position you're in and fixing it. When you write yourself into a corner, back out of the corner.