Fin Rovers
Game Mechanics & Narrative designer
Page Description
As I’ve been getting into the design and development of games, it never occurred to me how I hold a great interest in stories and narrative. I hold a lot of cherished memories relating to stories and narrative in games. And of course! Games are such a special and unique medium that allows for different ways of telling a story compared to movies and books. My interest for the topic only grew even more once this realisation dawned on me. Games allow for players to be active participants in their stories, making dialogue choices and exploring a world to their own pace and interest.
Narrative design is great to create more immersion into the world and its story, shape motivations for players to pursue and feed the sense of discovery to some players. Understanding the importance of narrative design and how it can be utilized to its strengths can help in the general game design as well, as I believe good narrative design finds union with both game- and level design (some games go as far to implement narrative into every corner possible).
This page is dedicated to my endeavours into narrative design specifically. The examples listed on this page are from my minor, which was dedicated towards learning narrative design and planning a project, and other examples of interactive stories that I’ve made worth showing.
Blood Bindings
Blood Bindings is an interactive story game created in Twine that features elements of adventure games and a branching story. This project was made for my Minor Skilled (2020-2021), a variation of minors offered by my university where the students shape and plan their own minor to give them the opportunity to learn and work on something that they are interested in. The minor therefore also places a lot of emphasis on self-discipline as each student is expected to carefully plan and develop their minor over the course of 6 months.
The story is a mystery-horror with some Lovecraftian elements set in XXX, England. It follows the young Aaron Baslar, heir to the wealthy Baslar family. Aaron is sheltered from the outside world due to their remote estate, being educated harshly by his stern father. One evening, the whole estate is shaken and brought into a gloomy parody of what was their home. Everyone in the estate vanishes, with every clue leading to the basement, which harbors an extensive labyrinth filled with gross mysteries, and hidden truth's about Aaron's family.
The story is rather extensive with plenty of things to improve on, given that it was my second attempt at creating an interactive story like this.
Minor Skilled Showcase
Flowchart for map progression
For this story, I first did some research into narrative design in general, as I wasn’t planning on making just a story, but rather a game with an extensive story. The research gave me a lot of new insights, particularly about the strengths and what elements to look at, as well what a narrative designer does considering their job and their tasks. I’ve used this research to draft the first design of my game and script this inside GameMaker Studio.
I say game, because my first attempt was actually an overshot attempt (and one too zealous) at creating a game with little to no experience in scripting one, so I found out quickly that this aspiration was too big and unrealistic for me to figure out alone in 6 months. I had to scale back my project for this, eventually focusing more on the story with some game elements. I also switched to Twine to create the story in, as it is perfect for branching stories and has capabilities for gameplay additions besides narrative choices.
After design, I worked on production and polish for the most part of minor, writing the story and programming it into Twine. I added a map and an inventory system to give the player something extra to work with while going through the story. The map was included to improve navigation (although the map can largely be improved). The inventory system worked largely akin to that of a point-and-click game, where the player finds new items and can use them to progress further into the story and other environments.
In the end, Minor Skilled was quite the test on self-discipline and planning. While I started off with great ambitions, sometimes you have to kill your darlings and start from scratch. I’ve sadly lost more time than I’d like to see, but I got all the more insight from it as well. Not only in terms of my new knowledge regarding narrative design, but also the experience of planning and designing a whole project on my own.
What I've accomplished
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Created a whole story with branching paths.
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5 Realized characters, with 2 complete character description documents
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Created a map and inventory system
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Coded everything in Twine
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Planned a whole project
Fleeting Fear
Fleeting fear was one of the very first stories I've created within Twine, and one of my very first steps into writing and immersive storytelling.
The story was created for a school assignment where we learned to create themes, story structure and character creation. This eventually cultivated into a branching narrative which includes different choices and multiple endings.
Synopsis:Tristan Hudou is a young adult coping with mental illness which leaves him barely unable to go outside. His mental state also leaves him troubled with trusting others, always reeling back to his long-time friend Dana, the only one he really trusts.His psychiatrist sees so little progression in Tristan’s condition that he wants to refer Tristan to a mental hospital called; “The Seventh Heaven”, fearing that he might deteriorate even further. Tristan is doubtful but eventually decides to commit himself after he gets convinced by Dana.While being doubtful and distrustful the first few days of his stay, Tristan slowly learns to open himself up to the hospital staff and allowing them to help him. That is until a weird stranger starts talking to him at night, telling him about a much more sinister plot taking place in the background of the facility where they perform inhuman acts on the patients. He hints at Tristan that he needs to plan his escape, however, Tristan has trouble placing his trust in the rambling stranger.
Over the course of his stay, the hospital slowly starts to show it's true colors, and Tristan might not be able to overcome its adversaries alone. By placing trust in the people around him and careful plotting through the hospital, Tristan’s fate will be determined.