How Forget-Me-Not Studios Created the 12, Memory Lane Mystery Game
Forget-Me-Not Studios discussed the origins of 12, Memory Lane, sharing the vision behind the game, the challenges faced during the development, and its approach to depicting Alzheimer's disease.
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Introduction
Forget-Me-Not is a team formed by students from the Rubika school in France for our final-year project. The team came together for 12, Memory Lane, which is our first completed and published game project as a group.
The design team consists of Zachary McIntyre (Lead & Vision Owner), Mathieu Cabot (Level Designer & Producer), and Marin Redor (Narrative Designer & Writer).
Together, we established the game's core mechanics, its story, and the overall direction of the project by connecting all the needs of the creative vision through to production. This was our first full-time project, which allowed us to set up a professional production pipeline and publish it a few months later.
12, Memory Lane
Originally, 12, Memory Lane was a project called The Architect, with a similar atmosphere but a different theme. The player was meant to explore the manor from the point of view of a rather unusual burglar with the ability to travel through time. Thanks to his powers and infiltration skills, he could modify elements of the manor in the past to affect its future and change the appearance of rooms.
For example, by hiding a love letter found in the house's past in the mailbox, he could fill the bedroom of the child who received it, who would never have been in a relationship and would never have left the house. The original idea came from our Vision Owner's fondness for puzzle and investigation games such as Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds.
The original core team had never been able to work on this type of project and wanted to take advantage of this appreciation for such games to take on the challenge. The game evolved a great deal, notably because the constraints of creating a game involving time travel seemed too complex to overcome for a final-year student project.
While we had assembled an art team capable of handling a photorealistic game with demanding level design, the lack of an FX Artist or Character Designer meant we could not base production on overly fantastical elements or on characters. This is part of what makes the project unique for us, but we believe the biggest factor is that each of us made sure to put something personal into the project, which is what led to its success and, above all, its final quality.
From art to game design to storytelling, 12, Memory Lane evolved into a personal project addressing themes that truly matter to us, such as family and identity, and that is what makes the project unique in our eyes.
Game's Story
12, Memory Lane is a first-person narrative investigation game in which the player takes on the role of Henry, a retired architect confronted with the sudden disappearance of his entire family. Suffering from Alzheimer's disease and trapped in his deserted manor where reality blends with distorted memories, he must investigate to push aside illusions and understand what happened within his own home.
The only anchor in this chaos is his memory notebook, in which he records key anecdotes from his life. Using the information it contains, the player must deduce the correct configuration of objects seemingly stuck between Henry's corrupted memories. By observing the environment and anchoring it to reality using sticky notes, the player gradually reconstructs the manor's rooms as they truly are.
Players can expect each reconstruction to reveal traces of the manor's past and its inhabitants, gradually uncovering the complex relationships, silences, and unspoken truths that shaped the Villemaine family. As the investigation progresses, Henry's life is revealed through intimate pieces of stories, depicting a broader family portrait and its fractures.
This theme gradually emerged during production as the core team of The Architect expanded into its final form, and the future of the project had to be clearly defined. We needed to anticipate how to make such a game with realistic goals and a team of around nine full-time members. When this question arose, we sought a theme that could unite our overall vision around a subject that would help us explore puzzle and deduction gameplay through the ever-changing nature of the house.
The topic of Alzheimer's gradually became the obvious choice, as it fit perfectly with the first version of our mechanics, and also because some team members had loved ones affected by the disease or by other illnesses with similar symptoms. Centering our creative process on the intention to address a personal subject allowed us to set a clear goal and clear boundaries, as we wanted to treat this topic with respect and creativity.
Mechanics
The game's main mechanic, and the one that accompanies the player throughout their progression, is the use of sticky notes. The player must use them to try to bring order to Henry's blurred memories, which manifest as unstable objects in the environment.
These unstable objects seem to transform into others, evoking alternative possibilities from Henry's past. To use the sticky notes, the main challenge of the game is to rely on Henry's memory notebook to deduce which objects cannot be the real ones based on the recorded memories.
Players who enjoy games that require various forms of deduction will love the versatility of this mechanic, which allows them to solve every situation in the game through different puzzles and contexts. More specifically, those who enjoy paying close attention to detail to uncover hidden elements in games will be able to make the most of it and discover all the fragments of the Villemaine family's story.
Development Process
The most difficult part of production was the hard-to-resolve conflict between the game's impressive visuals and our intention to represent Alzheimer's disease, which made the environment inherently unreliable at first glance. We went through many gameplay iterations to encourage players to focus on the content of the memory book and rely on it to understand the puzzles, much like a person affected by Alzheimer's would.
The very first version allowed players to modify rooms and objects in the house directly within the notebook using dropdown menus and labels. Unfortunately, this approach pushed players to spend too much time in the memory book and prevented them from fully enjoying the visuals and atmosphere, so we had to explore other solutions.
With each attempt and associated playtest, the issue gradually reversed: once interactions were taken out of the notebook, players became too focused on the environment and based their deductions on it, even though it was chaotic and designed to represent Alzheimer's disease, making it impossible to consider it fully reliable. This balance issue between the memory book and the environment remained throughout the entire production, and finding the right middle ground was really hard.
The use of sticky notes proved to be our most relevant solution, as it allowed us to preserve the narrative intention of embodying someone with Alzheimer's Disease while making interactions far more logical than simple changes within the notebook. Using them as anchors to lock an unstable reality also felt very intuitive to understand compared to previous iterations.
Each time, rigorous playtesting allowed us to evolve both the mechanics and the atmosphere, ensuring the game remained easy to pick up without being misled by our own biases. One of the other interesting challenges we discovered while working on a puzzle game was that, since the game is based on player knowledge, it quickly became impossible for us to remain objective about its quality.
We therefore had to plan playtests with different people each time to always get fresh perspectives on the puzzles. Through repeated testing and changes, the memory book remained the game's core object, clearly providing reliable information for deductions and, when necessary, reasoning by elimination.
From a design standpoint, the game evolved over the 8 months of production by gradually alternating between integration and testing phases to progressively refine the core gameplay into its current form. Today, we can say with certainty that production problems were not absent from development, but that our method led us to a very satisfying result, which we are proud of.
12, Memory Lane represents subjects that matter deeply to us through a lens we chose, and the fact that it was able to be published represents an invaluable experience for the rest of our careers. Of course, we still have much to learn, and claiming that we have found the perfect formula for producing a game would be quite presumptuous, but here are a few key points that helped us reach our current stage.
The first element is, of course, the importance of playtesting during production, especially for puzzle games, which are highly demanding in terms of player knowledge. The longer the production, the more playtests help reveal differences between player skill levels and team biases, as it is impossible not to be biased when testing a puzzle game whose solutions and controls you already know. Moreover, the broader the intended audience, the more crucial playtesting becomes to assess accessibility and difficulty for a wide range of players.
Conclusion
A large part of 12, Memory Lane's difficulty was indeed toned down, particularly because the meaning or etymology of certain words in clues or environmental elements could lead players into dead ends. Playtests made it possible to identify these issues and repeatedly rework the texts to provide clear and concise clues while maintaining a certain level of writing quality.
In short, it is important not to underestimate the iteration cycles enabled by regular playtesting, especially for games where text is one of the primary means of conveying information. The second element that truly improved our production throughout the project was our level of personal involvement.
One of the strong intentions of our Vision Owner from the very beginning was to allow each team member to be personally invested and to bring their own expertise to their area of production. Knowing that everyone would have a domain in which they could make decisions, we believe, allowed each team member to give their best from start to finish.
Of course, we remained very attentive to ensuring that no one worked entirely in isolation and that the creative direction guided efforts toward a shared goal. Nevertheless, we believe it is thanks to everyone's efforts and our different sensibilities that we achieved a result of such quality. Thank you for reading, and feel free to try 12, Memory Lane for free on Steam!
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