Narrative Design
DESCRIPTION
Here are examples of Narrative Games/Work I have made for a range of projects. I have a passion for narrative creation, and I am very proud of this work.
YEAR
2024-2025
Hunt The Witch
For my final year project, I created a short game experience, however, the focus was not on the gameplay but the narrative written for it.
​
I conducted a large plethora of research to make the storyline factual, and took care in ensuring characters were not sterotypical to that of many popular narrative games.
​
The main character is a young girl who must work and take care of her family to survive after the loss of her mother. This story is a fictional representation of real events that have happened, and pushes players to not only experience a fraction of what these women went through vicariously, but also edcuate them on the events and influenced misogeny around the time that still effects women today.
Narrative Proccess
After conducting research and roughly planning the storyline, I made a mock-up of a storyboard of the game events. This helped turn ideas into visuals I could then work off easily.
I used flow charts to plan out the narrative in detail, including all character dialogue and all responses that could be given. I wanted the player's choices to affect the dialogue with NPCs, so I wrote a range of different trees for each response the player could give, so gameplay was unique to each player based on their choices.
I also used a Beats and Pacing graph to look at the flow of the stpry line as it was important the game had a natural rise of action to a critical point before softly ending.
I created this in blueprints, using choices to determine which 'path' the dialogue took. From here, I could call different responses and conversations based on player actions, and reward/punish them for how they acted in situations.
Finally, the storyline was communicated to players by interacting with NPCs and ultimately, through their dialogue. Upon interacting with an NPC, a screen would pop up with their speech and a number of options to reply with. These aided in gameplay progress, gave storyline insight and factual information surrounding the time period andthe main character's life.
Indigo is a Shade of Red
This was the first narrative game I produced, and used dialogue trees to lead to 5 different endings. The game was an interactive story game, using images and text to communicate with the player.
​
The player's choices/replies were ranked on a scale of -2 to 2, with -2 being the negative ending and 2 before the positive ending. After every interaction, a point was added or deducted from the player's score, and the end was determined by the player's final score.
​
The game is called 'Indigo is a Shade of Red' as it tests the player's ability to forgive and do the 'right ' thing, whatever they decide that is. The main character is called Indigo, and stands neutral throughout the game, only influenced by the player's input to lean more towards the Red or Blue side, eg, Evil or Good.
​​
The narrative followed a girl in a poverish town who woke up in the heat of battle with no memory of how she got there. The game followed her as she found clues relating to her past, explored the town and spoke to the group of people that found her.
*SPOILERS*
​
In the end, the girl Indigo realises she is the princess of the kingdom, involved in an assassination attempt that failed and is now befriending her captors. The -2 ended, or as it's called, the Red ended, involves her magical powers awakening and destroying the whole town. The neutral ending/Indego ended shows her showing mercy to the captors and taking over the throne. The +2 good/Blue ending shows her releasing her magical powers into the kingdom and healing the damage her family has caused.
