![]() Now, ten years on, and presumably many thousands of hours of labor later, the result is the kind of highly polished, emotive, and seemingly artful video game that Maquette’s publisher Annapurna Interactive specializes in. An early version was showcased at the Game Developers Conference in 2011 despite a drab initial aesthetic, the demo’s recursive puzzles drew outbursts of applause from the audience even then, it represented around 100 hours of work for designer Hanford Lemoore. Players see the narrative and the puzzle design interlock to express complex emotions - the idea of building bridges to another person, the emotion of feeling turmoil reflected in the changing San Francisco landscape.For San Francisco studio Graceful Decay, it’s the product of a notably long development. (Annapurna Interactive) When gameplay and story sing During the breakup in “Maquette,” San Francisco twists and becomes distorted from the narrator’s perspective. At times, they’re illustrated by the storyteller’s drawings and the puzzles themselves become a metaphor for the internal drama he feels. Confessional bits of narrative pop up as Michael flips the pages and dives deep into the arabesque of memories. The two met at a San Francisco coffee shop and “Maquette” follows the flow of that relationship from friendship to romance to its looming end. “Maquette” takes place in the mind of Michael, voiced by Seth Gabel, who uncovers an old sketchbook, and that personal relic releases a flood of memories about a past relationship with an old flame named Kenzie, voiced by Bryce Dallas Howard. Instead, he grounded the narrative in the real world and San Francisco. “At the end of 2019, we played with the idea of a love story,” he said, but he didn’t want to make it a fantasy. The puzzles grow more abstract toward the end of the campaign, but they remain inventive exploring the outer limits of the recursive concepts. The concept even shrinks players who travel to the world’s outer edges. Lemoore and his team at Graceful Decay add in key and lock mechanics. It starts players off easy, teaching concepts about how players can manipulate an object’s size to get where they want. “Maquette” plays with this sense of scale through its seven chapters. Leaving it there, they can turn around and find an enormous key in the regular-sized world that lets them cross. They can head to the small replica, and use that same key, and because the replica is smaller, the key can turn into a bridge. ![]() ![]() The chasm is too large to jump across so players have to discover an alternative path. That leads to a puzzle where players have to get to a building across a gap but no bridge exists. For example, players can find a key that unlocks a door. The quirk at the heart of the gameplay is that players can grab certain objects and place them in the diorama and that is reflected in the bigger world outside. Players encounter a diorama that reflects the bigger world at large. The gameplay premise in “Maquette” involves a world within a world. They’ll notice that there’s a smaller replica of that same domed structure at the center of it. Like a gamified Russian nesting doll, players are dropped into an area that looks like the Palace of the Fine Arts. The idea focuses on a world within a world. It also ended up being the setting for “Maquette,” a puzzle game that he’s been working on for a decade. I fell in love with Victorian architecture.” “It was a whole new experience for me,” he said. He moved to the Mission District in 2010 right at 16th Street and Valencia. As an adult, the allure of the city was strong. ![]() Whenever there was a moment to celebrate, Lemoore’s family found themselves in the city. Growing up in the South Bay, Lemoore said San Francisco was the spot for special occasions. For game developer Hanford Lemoore, the city holds a special place both personally and professionally. ![]() The City by the Bay captures the imagination with its history, quirks and architecture. Everyone has a story about falling in love with San Francisco. ![]()
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