Fin Rovers
Game Mechanics & Narrative designer
Project Description
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. This project page is dedicated to show the process of the minor, its different phases and what I learned from it.
Minor Skilled Showcase
Why Narrative Design?
As I started to learn more about narrative techniques and story structures, my interest in storytelling grew rapidly. Over time, having read many books and played through countless games, it dawned on me how much I appreciated the art of story and narrative. Deep and involving characters, themes that are deeply rooted into the story and its actors and all the different ways how this creativity can be expressed made me realize the importance and impact of stories.
Minor Skilled was the perfect opportunity for me to take the initiative into learning how to creatively write and construct a story for a game. While the process of writing is fundamental for a good story of course, I chose to put my main focus on how to pair storytelling with game design.
Research
The first three weeks were dedicated to research and setting up the planning for the upcoming phases. I wanted to take a look at the fundamentals that comprise what storytelling is in games and how this differs from other mediums while also looking at job offers and what companies expect from a narrative designer. After documenting all the research, I compared 5 story-driven games and analysed how they handle different aspects when it comes to their narrative design and then used this information as foundation to step into the design phase.
Design
During this phase, I’ve started to see some delay in my planning building up. This was mainly the result of me changing my focus for the minor, as I first prepared to create and code a whole adventure game around my story. This, eventually, turned out to be not feasible as I needed to learn a lot of new things about scripting. Realizing that scripting my prototype already took me more than a week was a clear omen that I might have been a bit too ambitious.
I therefore switched my focus to create an adventure game with a story into creating a branching story with some elements of gameplay. Having to leave the prototype behind, I started to solely focus on writing and plotting the story. Before I wrote the meat of my narrative, I started off with some ideation in the form of some what-if questions. Once I figured out what kind of story I wanted to write, I thought of a theme and characters to play their part.
Production
After having switched my main focus to create a branching story with small gameplay elements, the production phase could begin. This phase consisted almost entirely on programming and implementing the story in Twine along with the gameplay. To make the gameplay work, I made a whole map framework that shows all the interactions and progression of the game, with all the interactions being made available by an inventory system.
Polish
The polish phase was a very quick one, sadly, but it was very much expected when doing such an assignment for the first time. The whole minor was a learning experience in both the subjects we decided to work on as well as our own self-discipline. While we did get guidance through the whole process, it was all up to us to create our own path to reach the end goal. Doing this for the first time, making mistakes in planning is bound to happen. And as I had to shift my planning more than I anticipated, the amount of polish I could still apply suffered a small bit.
Conclusion
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
Connections between story beats in Twine
Minor Skilled; A 6-month journey where I create, plan and develop my own project regarding narrative design.
A special take on the ordinary minor where everything from planning to production needed to be done all by myself. Here I document my whole process through a course of self-discipline while I enrich my knowledge and insight in narrative design and storytelling.
Minor Skilled: Narrative Design
