The Selection of the Story
The Team
Going over the basics, the brief of the project was the create a narrative game using an existing piece of media, but one that doesn’t have a game already produced. The mechanics created in the game had to be intrinsic to the game narrative and had to fit it’s purpose consisting of a beginning, middle, and end.
In order to make a concret decision on the narrative chosen for this project, each story that was considered was delivered in a list and was voted in the team with which was the most enjoyable. The team was multidisciplinary and consisted of:
2 Game Designers
4 UX Designers
1 Programmer
1 Animator
The Selection
For UX specifically, they all had seperated their own personal roles, however being two game designers we opted to split the task by having one of us control/create the narrative chosen, so one member would be the Lead Game Designer and the other the Narrative Designer. Alongside the team we discussed and made our own research on selected narratives searching in various different locations from Book, Short-Stories, Comics and even Movies. There was a handful of options and we ended using a table like so:
It was a very simple selection process, however The Monkey Paw was a narrative that I researched, after much consideration trying to understand how to implement mechanics into a short-story, a general concept was introduced. If unfamiliar ‘The Monkey Paw’ is a object in the short-story that allows a user to grant a wish, unknowningly once the wish is granted, great consequences will occur the balance the good and the bad. Spoiler for the story, but the main character wishes for a certain amount of money and he receives it the next morning at the cost of his son being killed due to faulty machinary at the company the son works for.
The concept for our narrative was to construct the game based on the wishes, where we already have a simple story to follow, the idea would be the create seperate narratives for wishes but that would be next part of the process as these wishes had to be realistic or somewhat believable to audiences if the game was played.
That’s the next part…..