Alien Station – Development Week 3
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Introduction As lead designer, producer, script writer, and possibly even but less likely so, programmer, on the project Alien Station (working title), I will primarily work on creating the game’s narrative and designing the game’s mechanics to work in unison with it, all the while documenting and making sure production is coherent. Week 3 of the course and project has been quite eclectic as far as my personal work goes: I have worked on three key areas for this week: Manuscript; the overarching story and its overall story in addition to dialogue script for one character encountered in the game. Prototyping in twine, and Dialogue system design. Manuscript The overall structure of the narrative has been defined and put to word, with introduction and conclusion being first out. To summarize in short; the player visits the ”end goal” of the game right at the start, which is the crime scene of a murder. They receive a device that they must identify, which makes up the middle of the narrative. At the end, the device will lead them to the crime scene again, where they will have an encounter with the murderer with different outcomes depending on their success during the middle act.  The dialogue I have been working on is closely linked to the area which I have been prototyping in Twine, namely, the dialogue tree of a character named Oz. Prototyping Using Twine as a tool for prototyping dialogue has been somewhat successful, although exporting text from Twine to use in the game will be too difficult and time-consuming, which means that I decided to write up the dialogue script separately. As such, I decided on spending less time on the twine prototype for now, in order to set aside more time for the dialogue script. Dialogue System Design Mechanically, the dialogue system was not sufficiently defined, making a diagram or other form of documentation necessary for clarity as well as convenience. In short, the dialogue system gives the player linearly progressing dialogue through the use of topics, but gives the player ways in which the dialogue progresses in a branching manner. These parts of the dialogue in term provide the player with a challenge and opportunity to raise their standing towards given NPC’s.  Conclusion Development begins to shape up, but there are still some things that need to be further defined, such as the point-and-click elements of exploration and thusly what objects will need to be intractable. Although I feel like many things have become more clear, such as the narrative structure and dialogue system, as the week comes to pass, there is still a need to prototype and test these things as soon as possible: I fear that the way the narrative is presented is key to making players vested in playing the game in the first place, so it would be best if there is at least a key piece of the narrative playable as early as possible. Therefore, Twine seems like the best option for now, but it has its own range of problems. As such, next week will be mostly dedicated to getting the twine prototype in order.  |