sun stealer

A VR game set on Bondi Beach near sunrise. You experience the flow of history from before colonisation through to present-day Sydney, see how history layers through human habitation, and learn the mechanics of photography well enough to get home with Time.

This started as an action script and became a game after feedback asked for less atmosphere and more intrigue. There were two ways to take it: lean into the camera techniques and make a narrative-led tutorial, or extend the magical realism already in there and build a real story arc around it. I took the second, and folded the camera techniques in as mechanics.

The camera is the mechanic

The camera is what makes this different from other adventure games. As you progress you collect lenses and film backs, and each changes what the camera can do.

Lenses set which Time you can see into. Focal length is the dial — a longer lens sees further forward, a shorter one further back.

• 10mm — precolonial time.
• 32mm — the start of the colonial period.
• 90mm — the eighties.

Film stocks change what you can bring back. This is where the gameplay gets its spice:

• No film — the camera reverses time in the area in front of you.
• Delta 3200 — high ISO, so you can take elements from night-time.
• Aerochrome — infrared sensitive, letting you shift temperature.
• Portra 160 — a portrait film, so you can bring a person across for a brief moment.
• Ektar 100 — architectural film, which creates permanent interventions from other time layers.

There’s also a radio, which tunes into audio from different time layers so each period brings its own music.

Why it isn’t photorealistic

Even though the entire mechanic is photography, the art style is stylised rather than photorealistic. Two reasons: the fidelity needed for photorealism is hard to reach without hurting player comfort, and simplifying the environment leaves far more room to show what the different film stocks are doing. Bold, simple palette, comic-inspired shaping and outlines.

The first arc — level one

Exposition. You wake in your bedroom; it’s early. You dress, set up your character, grab your grandmother’s camera bag and head for the beach. At the cliff you pick a path — two lead down into the game, one keeps you out of the time loop entirely.

Take that third path and you meet a kind stranger who warns you about the danger ahead. You can push on anyway, which starts the main game — or have breakfast with them, which unfolds their back story and implies, by the end, that they are both you and your grandmother. That ends the game. You can finish sun stealer in about five minutes if you talk to the right person.

Otherwise you walk the cliffside taking photos, and notice the world getting darker instead of lighter. Dawn doesn’t break. You’re being followed. Run, and the world shifts out of focus and everything goes black.

Rising action. You wake washed up on the shore. It’s Bondi, but with no sign of human habitation — only a strange dawn light everywhere. You find the camera but not the bag. Footsteps lead off the beach into the trees, and at the end of them is a shelter with an old lady sitting in it.

Talking to her, you find out you’re lost in Time. She explains that time is like layers of paint, each moment over the last. At certain points in the year the layers thin and go fuzzy, and with the right equipment and a bit of bad luck it becomes possible to mix them. Your grandmother’s camera is one of those pieces of equipment — temporally polarised, able to steal light from different layers, with wildly different effects depending on how it’s used.

To get home you need to find the missing pieces of the camera bag and travel the layers. All before sunrise ends, or you’re stuck here.

Climax and falling action. She asks you to clear a rockslide on the path ahead in exchange for an item — which doubles as the tutorial, teaching the reverse-time mechanic through a simple puzzle. When you return she gives you a roll of Ektar 100, which lets you build a bridge into the next section.

As you leave, she calls out: time is funny enough before you start playing with it, and some choices have consequences you can’t foresee. Objects fall out of place and can’t find their way home. So help anyone you can along the way.

Denouement. Back on the beach, you look through the camera and realise you’re still at Bondi — just somewhere in the past. The path is blocked. You use the camera to clear it, and level two begins.

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Full document, including the art direction references and appendix, in the PDF below.