Session Name: | 80 DAYS Post-mortem: Letting the Game Tell the Story |
Speaker(s): | Jon Ingold |
Company Name(s): | inkle |
Track / Format: | Indie |
Overview: | Our initial design for 80 Days was simple - a choice-based story, laid out across a globe map, with a resource management element for health and money. But during development, it expanded in scope and ambition to become something quite different: a board-game, which narrates itself, with the narrative adapting to the circumstances of the game, but sometimes changing them as well. In this talk, we'll outline the iterations we went through, and discuss in detail how we built the story content to be flexible while remaining consistent and compelling. We'll show in detail how the various game-elements - the art, the in-world economy, and the multiplayer - work together to create the narrative momentum, and how removing constraints from the content freed us up to write more interesting stories. |