Tell Tale Heart
the final wireframe for the dialogue
(pop it out to see!)
The first slide deck for our game.
the beta wireframe for the dialogue
(pop it out to see!)
The final slide deck for our game.
Role: Game / Narrative Designer Team Size: 4 developers
Genre: Puzzle
Software: Unity
Time: 5 weeks
The Project
An experimental narrative-puzzle game, developed within the span of 5 weeks by a 4 person team for a digital storytelling class. We were tasked with coinverting a public domain story into a short, interactive experience. Created using unity.
You play as the speaker from the original story, attempting to avoid suspicion from policemen and successfully get away with murder. though that’s much easier said than done:
As the player create using a letter bank to answer investigative questions from policemen
answer correctly and they become less suspicious
answer incorrectly and they become more suspicious, and the beating of the heart beneath the floor grows louder
My Role
I was the primary game and narrative designer.
Since we were on such a small team, i was the only one developing mechanics and narrative. Though i did so with the feedback and suggestions of my teammembers who focused on art and programming to make sure nothing was overscoped considering our short turnaround time.
What I learned
the alpha wireframe for the dialogue
(pop it out to see!)
Sometimes narrative design is more editing than creating and writing:
Since we had decided to challenge ourselves, especially our programmers, to create an experimental game we had never done before there were many times our original ideas did not work out. I had to significantly edit and rewrite much of the dialogue, at least several times per week of development to account for programming issues and scope.
Timely Communication is the most important thing:
Throughout the project there were small miscommunication issues that occasionally snowballed into a larger problems. there were several tweaks made during the programming phase, which altered how the game was played, but those changes were not always communicated timely. this caused several setbacks on dialogue and art development.
Sticking to deadlines is the second most important thing:
There were a minor amount of times where team members didn’t finish their work by their assigned deadline. this would thus set back the team member who needed their work to be done to complete their own. this usually caused the implementation of the narrative to be done later than expected.
The Process
I began with a simple dialogue tree style of narrative in mind, with multiple answer options for the puzzle. However my team and I quickly realized that would be out of our scope. So we simplified our approach and I created a linear narrative instead. to make the responses still meaningful, we defined one correct response for the puzzles and attached that to a suspicion mechanic. I did another revision to this linear narrative in response to feedback from playtesting.