YAKO / 夜行 - Final Game and Development Portfolio
DST61104 Games Development · Final Submission
YAKO
夜行
A PSX-inspired first-person walking narrative about staying awake in a city that has forgotten how to answer.
01 · Presentation
Game presentation and demonstration
This narrated presentation introduces YAKO's mental-wellness concept, demonstrates the complete player loop, and explains the key systems and design decisions behind the final build.
Suggested chapters: Concept · Core Loop · NPCs · Cigarette · Map Flow · Backroom · Yellow Ducks · Art and Audio · Localization · Dual Endings
02 · Game overview
A small night walk with a long emotional shadow
YAKO is a short first-person narrative exploration game set in a surreal city at night. The player inhabits Yoko, a young runaway moving through five connected districts and one impossible Backroom. Along the way, she can speak with animal strangers, light a cigarette, and collect five yellow ducks that reveal fragments of memory.
There is no combat, score, health bar, timer, or fail state. The journey is designed around observation, optional conversation, and the choice to leave when the player is ready.
The project approaches mental wellness through emotional ambiguity rather than diagnosis. Its themes include isolation, avoidance, distance, and the idea that a person does not need to feel perfectly whole before continuing.
03 · Player experience
Move slowly. Notice more. Leave when ready.
The loop rewards attention rather than mechanical mastery. Every conversation and collectible is optional; reaching the television always completes the journey.
04 · Final features
What the final build contains
05 · Key visuals
The city at night
06 · Development story
Protecting silence: why we cut the Duck companion
In GDD v0.7, Duck followed the player as a continuous inner voice. Once the larger route and NPC cast became playable, the companion created too many interruptions and competed with the quiet atmosphere.
We removed the persistent companion and retained its emotional role through five optional yellow duck collectibles. This reduced interface load, protected periods of silence, and made memory something the player discovers rather than something the game constantly explains.
The most important iteration was subtractive: removing one feature improved pacing, clarity, and player ownership.
07 · Technical development
Making five maps feel like one journey
Each district is a separate Godot scene, but the player must travel forward and backward without appearing on the wrong side of a gate. SceneManager handles fades and loading, while TravelState records the origin and selects a named reciprocal spawn point.
We repeatedly fixed spawn orientation, trigger placement, collision boundaries, and the one-shot Backroom return state. The result is a route that feels continuous even though it is assembled from independent scenes.
08 · Art and audio
From readable prototype to authored night
The final visual pass unified every district with a 320×240 internal viewport, vertex snapping, dithering, a star-sky shader, cool ambient and moonlight, distance fog, warm emissive windows, and restrained building glow. The goal is not strict PlayStation hardware emulation; it is the feeling of remembering a city through unstable visual detail.
09 · Conditional finale
Five fragments, two ending variants
The secret route adds recognition, not superiority. Both endings complete the game and neither is labelled as the correct recovery.
10 · UI and accessibility
The interface waits at the edge of attention
YAKO removes conventional HUD elements so the environment remains central. Interactable characters communicate through outline and facing feedback, while dialogue uses high contrast and short typewriter sequences.
The final settings support English, Chinese, and Japanese, together with persistent master-volume control. There are no timed input challenges or failure states.
11 · Technical highlights
Small game, interconnected systems
- SceneManager + TravelState: fades, scene loading, origin tracking and reciprocal spawn points.
- NPCBase: shared interaction range, focus outline, facing, dialogue state, repeat lines and procedural sound.
- YellowDuckState: five unique collectible IDs and the final completion condition.
- BackroomState: one-shot branch entry, Caveman conversation gate and correct return.
- Localization + SettingsState: English, Chinese, Japanese and persistent master volume.
- BGMPlayer: per-scene music continuity across the complete route.
Final technical profile: Godot 4.6 · Forward+ · Jolt Physics · Direct3D 12 · 320×240 internal viewport · 30 scripts · 35 scenes · Windows x86_64.
12 · Outcome and reflection
A finished route with intentional boundaries
The final game is deliberately small but complete. Its strongest result is the consistency between its mechanics and emotional goal: movement is uncomplicated, conversations are optional, and the secret route offers recognition without turning recovery into a collectible score.
The most valuable production lesson was to judge every feature by the atmosphere it created, not by how much content it added. With more time, we would prioritise control remapping, a motion-comfort toggle, a graphics compatibility preset, wider hardware testing, and a lightweight resume system before expanding the story.
13 · Team and attribution
YellowDuck Studio
Production direction, gameplay code, systems integration, UI, state flow, debugging, technical documentation, and build coordination.
Map assembly, environment composition, art integration, spatial dressing, visual iteration, and scene presentation.
Final Windows build
Are you here?
Extract the downloaded archive and run the YAKO executable. Windows 10/11, keyboard and mouse. Content note: melancholic themes and smoking depiction.
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