The History of The Wind and the Wisp

An MFA Thesis Project 

The Wind and the Wisp is an MFA thesis project that explores grief and what it means to lose someone. The project is inspired by a personal experience losing my best friend in 2017. Her memory and the feelings I've experienced over the last 7 years has shaped a lot of my work at USC, The Wind and the Wisp is another manifestation of my explorations of grief. 

Introduction

What is grief? There are so many different ways to answer this question. There’s the biochemical change that occurs in our brain when we experience grief. Then there’s the emotional aspect of losing someone important to you. There’s grief just after loss and there’s grief five years later. Grief is a complex emotional experience that we all have experienced, and will all continue to experience. There’s a duality to grief and going through the loss of a loved one. I’ve often thought to myself: “what a privilege it is to feel pain, because that means it was real. But that doesn’t change the fact that it hurts.” This mix of emotions in relation to loss has been a major interest for me for years, and led to my thesis question: 

In my faculty pitch in April 2024, I briefly shared my story and experience having lost my best friend: 

"I was young at the time and felt really lonely and isolated, because not many of my peers had gone through the same experience. Reflecting on that time of my life, I later on realized something that got me through those times was reminiscing specifically on my time with my friend. It was almost like they were still there for me, even if they were gone. Maybe that was part of coping, but it helped me to imagine they were still taking care of me. This was incredible and weird, to feel lonely and not so lonely at the same time. But this helped me move forward and find a new normal.

I am not here to tell a sad story, and I am not here to tell specifically my story! I’m here to create an experience that draws from my own experiences with grief to evoke the emotions that might occur, and provide a hopeful outlook, one that remembers even if there are people no longer in our lives, the impact they had on us will stay forever."

This feeling is what has ultimately shaped the project goals. I focused on building an experience that was not specific to mine, but about more universally understood feelings of connection and loss, and what it's like to share an adventure with a friend.

Project Goals

Get the player to feel like they are both the Wind and the Wisp. 

The blowing mechanic should strengthen the connection with the Wisp. 

History

The Wind and the Wisp was originally called Red (named after the Wisp's red string and the red string of fate).

When I embarked on my thesis journe in Spring 2024, I had many things in my mind, all fuzzy concepts. I was interested in the red string of fate and how it binds us together, across space in time. I was interested in connection and how humans connect. I was interested in creating an experience that is lonely but also feels like someone is with you. 

The original concept was the Wisp is collecting water to water sprouts and raise them into flowers that can be picked and brought back to their garden. The Wisp is the soul of someone who has passed away, and the flowers represent the emotions of someone who is still alive that misses them.

I was extremely dissatisfied with a lot of these prototypes. They were cute and charming, but I was having a hard time imagining the rest of the game, and I was struggling to see the creative value. These prototypes also didn't feel very "crunchy". They had a core loop, but were missing a strong core mechanic and I think lacked the feeling of having another person there that I wanted to have. Around this time I threw nearly everything away and went off the rails prototyping. I explored more about the red string, and even bought a 30-foot rope and tied two of my classmates together in a physical prototype about connection and being bound together. 

I knew the core of what I wanted to explore was about loss and missing someone. 

It was around this time I noticed I was sighing a lot, because school was stressing me out, but I also noticed that it felt good. It felt like releasing everything that I was holding onto. I found this sensation very interesting and came up with a semi physical prototype around holding your breath. It takes place in the player character Penny's apartment. There is a doll hanging on her window that reminds her of her lost friend Clover. When you hold your breath, you can stop time and explore the memory related to the doll. Penny will have voiceover and reminisce about how Clover would hang the doll up on the window to dispel rainclouds, because her little sister was scared of the rain. Clover was a great older sister who took care of her younger sister and played with her 4 favorite dolls on the blue cushions. However, it's a double-edged sword. Although you can stop time and explore fond memories, time in the real world doesn't pass. This was represented by a flower in the apartment that only grows and blooms if you spend time in present day. Additionally, as time goes on, the more times you revisit this memory, it starts to change little by little, as memory so often does over time. Penny begins to get frustrated that she can no longer remember the details about the memory: if the couch cushions in her childhood home were blue or green, if Clover's little sister had 3 favorite toys or 4. As frustration builds, these memories begin to sour and become painful. The end of this story would resolve in Pennt realizing that, although it hurts to lose these details of cherished memories with her best friend, she won't ever forget that Clover was a good big sister and used the doll to protect her little sister from her fears. And this would provide Penny great comfort. 

I completely fell in love with this prototype, the core mechanic was very strong and one playtester said: "I think the memory is a good one but the character is having a hard time processing it." Others mentioned they were sad and frustrated not being able to stay in memories for longer, and were perplexed when they realized the memories were changing. However, something about this project felt very solved. It felt like I had a lot of very clear design challenges and design answers laid out before me (famous last words) but something still felt a little off about this idea. I felt like I had a very clear idea of what to make and more importantly, how I'd be able to make it on my own. It also felt like it was experiencing the same problem as all of the Wisp prototypes that the sense of another person was lacking, but now from the perspective of the alive best friend. 

So I looked to try and find ways to combine the two ideas. Maybe it would be a two-person game but people didn't realize it's co-op? The Wisp is only able to water their flowers when the Alive Friend wasn't holding their breath? However, maybe the Alive Friend needs to also hold their breath to stop time to achieve their own goals of sorts, such as come to terms with the fact that memories are fading? What are the individual goals of each player that are creating dissonance but also simultaneously harmoniously working together? This idea raised a lot of massive design questions, but the concept of two characters who are not on the same plane of existence working together was starting to push in the correct direction.

I started by defining the two characters and separating the control schemes. One character is the Wisp, who is a traditional, on-screen character controlled by keyboard/controller. The other character (who I just called "the best friend" for a very long time) is meant to be the player from first person, who can input into the came by blowing into the microphone. The two characters will be separated by death, but still find ways to communicate and work with each other, and heal from the loss together.