Forget You Not

I developed a concept for a game about dementia, inspired by my grandmother’s life story. This was a master thesis at HAW Hamburg.

The result is a platform game, in which you discover memories through the eyes of dementia patient Nani.  While traveling through her past in reversed chronology you gain access to more and more complex level design. Nani starts out as an old woman, who can’t really move very much. Her surroundings are very monochrome and look almost unreal. While she travels through this house, she finds memories that are brightly coloured. I used a mixture of keyframe animation and frame by frame animation to show the contrast between memory and reality. As you progress through the memories the reality vanishes more and more.
All of the family members are depicted as sheep, while everyone who, in Nani’s eyes is a “bad guy”, are wolves. Her father wears wolf’s clothes after he returns.

You play 16 year old Nani. She is going to pick up her father from the train station after he’s been deported for a long time. He probably won’t even recognize her.

It’s based on the real memory of my grandmother who suffers from dementia. She grew up in a German area in Romania called “Banat” and lived in very poor circumstances. Her father got deported after WWII because of his German heritage, although he had been fighting on the Allies side. When he came back, he entered his family’s house backwards and stated that he had fallen in love with a woman and wanted to live with her in the big city. My grandmother was supposed to go with him, but she denied him.