Whisper

Date: Oct 2017 - Aug 2020
Category: Game Design, Level Design, Programming

I developed Whisper as part of my Master Thesis project at the Cologne Game Lab. It is a short interactive experience about the way we perceive reality in games, and the contrast that may occur if we are in an environment where our senses receive inputs on a different level of detail.

Assuming that “when you can’t see them, things are what they sound like”, players will be able to change things’ behaviors by swapping the sound they produce; though the game aims mainly at being a (possibly) mind-bending experience, it also features challenging puzzles to test the limits of its weird reality.

Though the goal of the game is mainly to let the player experience something hardly doable with other mediums, this doesn’t happen without actual interaction: puzzle solving is a core feature that helps the player immersing in the weird reality of the game, taking his characteristics to the extreme and paradoxical consequences.

As a solo project, this gave me the chance of experiencing every part of game development from concept to implementation trough programming, as well as communicating with professional figures to whom I outsourced some aspects of content creation.

After graduating I kept on developing and promoting Whisper, with the help of two classmates for sound design and dialogues writing. Whisper was showcased in Vienna (Radius Festival) and Milan (Game Over Festival) in 2016, before being chosen as a Honorable Mention in the 2017 edition of the AMaze Festival in Berlin.

In early 2020, I decided to put some more work into the game to allow it to run smoothly within Steam, implementing some accessibility options and support for Achievements, in order to learn more about the publishing process on the platform.