Diving Into Narrative Design

I was approached by my developer friend, he had this free art asset pack that he wanted us to use. He had a basic control scheme in mind he wanted to try and my job as game designer was to come up with a game idea.

The image right here is what the assets looked like, all he really wanted to do was switch between them and have the camera follow them around as they traversed the level which, by the way, was quite short. Because we are all about experimentation I decided I wanted to try and make a social deduction game. The catch? it's a one player game.

Set in a Gothic town those four character are the last survivors of a vampire attack. Obviously one of them is the vampire, but who? That is what the player must figure and those were the mechanics I needed to come up with.

Of course we wanted a high replay-ability factor so, we decided each new game would randomly assign the vampire role to one of the four characters. Additionally, we had 3 other roles that would also be randomly assigned to the remaining characters. By switching characters and having them interact with one another the player would gather enough clues to determine who was the vampire.

It all sounded really nice until I realized the number of dialog lines I would have to write if I wanted to cover all possible combinations. with just one line per combination of characters it was way more than I wanted to dedicate to this project, and at some point those lines would start to sound repetitive. So I implemented a series of constraints that resulted in less lines to write but more complexity for my friend to code, there has to be a trade of right? In the end ?I wrote 7 lines per character/role combination, 91 in total. Almost one third of what I had originally planned, and the results was far more interesting characters with more lines to develop their personalities. In the image, highlighted in green is the first combination of characters and roles we want to test. After that is done we will publish the complete game and will post an update with the link.