00:04Hi folks, my name is Jonathan Jacques Belletet. I am the creative director of Hell Is Us. Today I'd
00:10like to take a bit of your time to talk about the three distinct narrative layers, but also how we
00:15created this game from scratch and the kind of like processes that brought us to its world,
00:20its gameplay, and these three narrative layers. So for Hell Is Us, I took a bit of time to figure
00:27out what I wanted these kind of high-level directives to be. They're a mixed bag of things that had
00:33always
00:33been dear to me and also stuff that I kind of knew that the team also wanted to try and
00:38work with.
00:39So I came up with about five or six and I proposed them to the team and we all agreed
00:43and we went
00:44ahead with them. So the first one at the top of the list is exploration and discovery. When it's
00:48truly player-driven, when it's like player cognitive abilities that are putting two and two together
00:55to discover the secrets of the game through your exploration. So the second one is pretty much
01:01I guess the main theme of the game. It's human emotions and passions and specifically how they
01:07relate to human conflicts, all the horrors and the atrocities and the bloodshed that we can bring
01:13upon one another. The third one is the civil war and as you can see this relates right away to
01:20the
01:20second one about the passions and the emotion. The fourth directive was the combat system of the
01:25game had to be a third person melee combat with melee weapons. The fifth directive was that the game
01:32had to take place within a contemporary setting as as you can see this brought a bit of a challenge
01:37how to justify the third person melee combat in a contemporary setting. And the sixth one is I wanted to
01:44make sure that the enemies in the game were not humans and we would not bring any harm to human
01:52beings.
01:52So now that we had our set of directives, we're ready to really sit down and create the game and
01:57then we
01:57created this story and this brought us the three distinct narrative layers that we have in the game.
02:03The first narrative layers is the civil war. It's the main backdrop of the game. It's caused by ethnic divides,
02:12religious divides, cultural divides, political divides, and also historical divides. The second
02:17narrative layer is about the calamity. So the calamity is a bit of a kind of like metaphysical
02:23phenomenon that's taking place in the country and the hero and the player as they enter the game world
02:30obviously they're aware that there's a civil war but the hero doesn't know that there's also the calamity
02:35and really rapidly he will come face to face with it. So why is it here? Where is it from?
02:41What is it
02:41connected to? And what's its link with the people, the civil war, and the history of the country?
02:47The third narrative layer is the family. So this is something that's really dear to me and mostly
02:52when we look at it through the lens of conflicts, war, civil war, and whatnot because families are
02:58often one of the first victims of conflicts, especially children as well. But our hero was
03:05actually born in the hermit state but his parents smuggled him out when he was five years old. He's
03:09always wanted to come back because he's got questions, right? He wants to know you know who
03:12they are, why did they abandon him, and also who is he because he's missing that part of himself
03:18that your parents kind of provide you. So all these three narrative layers are different but they
03:24intertwine. One of them is the one that truly brings you through the main story but since the game is
03:30fairly open-ended and non-linear the players are free to oscillate between these three layers as they
03:36they see fit and kind of put them together to form the the big picture of the game and the
03:43entire
03:44puzzle or almost the entire puzzle to make sense of what's going on inside this country. So in the near
03:50future we'll talk a lot more about these things in a lot more details. This was it for now. I
03:56hope
03:56you enjoyed. Thank you for watching and see you soon.
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