Come Back Home
Based on a myth, Come Back Home is a 3D platforming exploration game about a young girl, Anaaya, who discovers her village has disappeared overnight after returning from a fishing trip. She must piece together the clues and find out where her village has gone.
Come Back Home began as a collaborative class project between the Digital Arts and Computer Science departments at Bowling Green State University. The game draws narrative elements from a myth of a vanished village in northern Canada. In the myth, a trapper who frequented the village found it completely empty one day, as if all its inhabitants dropped what they were doing and vanished. Since no one knows the truth of this mystery, CBH is a retelling of this story from the perspective of a little girl who was estranged from this event.
Back in middle school, I (the director) developed a character I felt very attached to – a young girl who had run away from home and later returned to find her village in ruins. This mini plot, along with the children’s book Julie of the Wolves (a story that was the catalyst for my interest in art), inspired the general basis for our game.
The underlying themes of CBH comes from this novel, which tells the story of a girl who learned to coexist with wolves and eventually is faced with choosing between two traditions. Similarly, the journey of Anaaya is about identity and self-discovery, about feeling displaced despite familiarity. She is an expression of myself – a long-term immigrant who faces going back to a “home” I know nothing of.
In-game Screenshots
Concept Sketches
MFA Thesis Exhibition & SXSW 2017 Student Showcase
