Following my blog post on the Phase Three presentation and peer review, I've had a drastic thought. Unhappy with the direction the project is going in, I was drawn back to my original idea for the land and sea game in which a creature tells small fables about their life as they journey homeward.
I feel like this structure is the purest culmination of all my initial research on fables and journeys. I am aware of the fact that I am working as part of a team, however I feel like my initial creative vision for this has been muddied by a need for "gameplay" to the extent that my ability to tell a story has been really inhibited. Constant compromising on this issue has left me creating stories that don't truly fit the form I was intending them to be in. They also don't have the impact they should, because instead of crafting the perfect story, I have been trying to make sure there's room for mechanics, something that is absolutely not a priority for a narrative-driven game.
Leaning back into this idea of telling a story rather than creating a game, I returned to my initial research. My narrative design blog demonstrates that I wanted to tell a story of personal redemption rather than a greater narrative about community. Still aware of the problems of my first iteration of the story, I thought a way to tackle my initial problems was not to have two competing narratives (of the creature travelling home and the fish going on an adventure). Instead, to have one character who tells individual stories, not concerned with having an in-your-face narrative that the player clearly sees as an allegory for her life.
The character that I wanted to take forward was formless, but had a name: Maive. Her story is that she left her home and family for the promise of riches, failed in her pursuit, and was too prideful to accept help. At her lowest, she was approached by a travelling storyteller, a magic being whose stories are brought to life and written into books. She set aside her pride and accepted the help of the travelling storyteller, learning their ways and becoming one herself. She spent years travelling, telling stories, until she finally she summoned the courage to return home, which is where we start her story.
I broke down the narrative into three individual beats:
1. Leave home for the promise of riches.
2. Fail, and set aside pride to accept help from those you may not expect.
3. Find your way home again.
These stories can be told individually, without me worrying too much about deeply developing them. After all, fables aren't riddled with subplots and other characters. My research in Phase Two showed that for the most part, fables revolve around a single character who is changed by another, singular character. Instead of getting sidetracked by the idea of two-player gameplay like I did last time, I pushed myself to create three fables that fit these beats.
Fable 1:
A creature is told of a great treasure by a foreigner, and leaves everything they know to find it. After a long time travelling, they find the treasure. It is valuable to the foreigner, but useless to the creature.
Moral: do not believe everything you hear/one man's treasure is another man's trash.
Fable 2:
A proud king is building a castle. They accept help from everyone, but when the tiniest creature offers to help, they laugh and say they don't need it. A storm hits during the building process, and everyone flees, leaving the king stuck with no form of help. The only one to remain is the tiniest creature, whose particular skills will help in this situation. The tiniest creature is not proud, however, and offers to save them. The king agrees, and once the castle is finished, makes the tiniest creature their closest advisor.
Moral: even the tiniest of creatures can make the biggest difference.
Fable 3:
A child wants to go adventuring, but their mother says no, as they will get lost in the dark. The child sneaks out anyway, and gets lost. In the morning of the first day, the mother goes searching, but the child is too far away to hear her calls. On the second day, the mother goes out and leaves a trail of objects back to the house. On the third day, the child finds the first thing in the trail and finds their way home, safe with their mother again.
Moral: those who love you will help you get home.
The next step was to find situations that would allow Maive to tell these stories. What was important to me was that the creatures listening to Maive's story could also relate to them, which pushes into the idea of "universal truths" as per my fable research. This actually helped in creating the characters and situations that allowed Maive to tell her story, as their stories could mirror the fables.
My first character was a malcontent teenager who is upset living in a small village where there isn't much to do, or a lot of money. They want to escape, finding wealth and riches in the great unknown. The undertones need to communicate a discontent that's not appreciative of the life that he has, not being trapped by his surroundings. This character will also allow for the exposition of Maive's profession, identifying her as a travelling storyteller and asking how she became one. Maive will be able to tell the character that she made bad decisions, and at her lowest was saved by a travelling storyteller.
The character for the second fable is a creature in a trap who is refusing help, protesting that they're perfectly capable of escaping the situation themselves. Maive's personality is demonstrated here by her setting up camp beside the creature, saying if they don't want help she won't give it, and telling her "captive" audience the second story.
The third character is a lost child that Maive helps lead home. She tells the story as a way to soothe the character, but the character finds their parent and runs off before Maive can finish the third story, leaving an element of mystery as to whether or not the story character finds their way home. This mirrors the uncertainty that Maive feels in the conclusion of her own story, as she is still on her way home.
I knitted together these elements. The full outline can be read here.
I also wanted the visuals of this to be rich and natural, perhaps set in a forest with dappled light visuals as in Tunic (see header image). The style would lean further towards fantasy, which was Kerris' original theme.
I mocked up some ideas for what the character of Maive could look like.
I chose creatures that dwell in a forest: a fox, a red panda and a wolf. I added the horns to experiment with the idea of creating a fantasy version of this character, which I also tried to emphasise with the cloak that I gave all of them. I designed a small concept for a scroll-shaped pin that holds the cloak together, thinking this might be a sigil for the travelling storytellers. There isn't much variation in body shape, as I like the effect of a large head and small body, as it gives a cute, child-like appearance to the characters, as supported by a research paper by Hanna Ekström.
Outside of this development, I contacted my course leader and my team to see if they were interested in this change. Sid was immediately on board, feeling much more connected to this story than the last one, and not minding that the story didn't include aspects from his seamounts theme that had influenced the first idea. He was interested in the prospect of bringing the idea to life much more than Upside Island, connecting to the character of Maive more closely. However when I contacted Kerris, she was unsure as to how this story would translate into gameplay. Gameplay is not the priority for a game such as this, in my opinion. As a big fan of narrative games, I know many that have very few "mechanics" and focus solely on telling the story well.
Oxenfree and Afterparty are both games by Night School Studio that rely fundamentally on dialogue and visual storytelling with only a few technical mechanics thrown in. In a postmortem, Sean Krankel discusses how the Oxenfree team had to dramatically re-evaluate their approach to the storytelling of the game when they started to overburden the game with unnecessary mechanics. They stripped back many elements, including only what was necessary to the plot (the radio mechanic), and focusing on making things like the dialogue mechanic as polished and seamless as possible.
Night In The Woods has few mechanics other than dialogue, jumping, and a few simple mini-games that include controlling the protagonist's hand as she grabs things, smashing lightbulbs with a baseball bat, or using a telescope to find constellations in the night sky. The narrative of the game is about friendship, self-discovery, a secret murderous cult, and coincidentally involves a redemption arc. The game isn't experienced primarily through mechanics, but through the relationships the player builds mentally with the characters throughout the course of the narrative.
Point and click games like Broken Age and Little Misfortune are modern examples of a historical form of storytelling through games. "Puzzles" are solved through finding and combining objects and talking to people, and that's it. This form of game gives plenty of room for narrative designers to tell their story. They are often referred to as "interactive stories", which is what I'm primarily focused on creating.
After a long discussion with the team we agreed that we're all happy about taking the game in this new direction. We want to include minimal but polished mechanics that make the game a seamless playable experience with a hard leaning on story through things like dialogue and character design. We will be developing this idea further over the course of Phase Four.