Alongame
Project Overview:
Released a worldbuilding game per week for 4 weeks with creative partners (LARP makers, props designers, personal game creators), iterating off players’ interaction to create the next game.Roles and responsibilities
Design
Nonlinear & linear narrative design, visual scripting in Harlowe for Twine, tool development, design documentation, bug fixing, analysing playtest data and feedback, gameplay scripting, quest designWriting
Writing scripts & all supporting material, stakeholder management, topic research, pitching, image editing, iterating in collaboration with multiple departments, deck creationProcess and approach
Process
Pitched to become part of the “writers room”, developed the world and a bank of games with the creative partners and solo for two weeks, then continued to develop new TTRPGs and perform them once a week for a month, iterated in feedback meetings over Zoom, solo developed prototypes in Twine, designed 3 new poetic forms, wrote or copyedited all “in-universe” missives, narrative design and quest design for all of the TTRPGs, created digital card game + art content in Pixlr for gameplay mechanics, deliver a weekly broadcast (Twitch) interacting with players and the new gameApproach
As the world was “cozy semi-historical”, I approached the concept of design centering the question: how do I create the right kind of conflict for meaningful storytelling, without violence or fear as the primary motivating factors? I then used a lot of my historical knowledge from my MA in Modern History (University of St Andrews) to build grounded games that could be played alone but that connected players to some kind of community.Tools and technologies
Kanban, Pixlr, Zoom, Discord, Twitch, Audacity, GoogledocsSample of work
https://explorealongame.wordpress.com/the-alongame-shelves-2021/
Team collaboration
Internal
Project Manager kept project running to time and budget, co-developed some of the games with creative partners (LARP makers, props designers, personal game creators)Client-side
Gathered responses to previous games via website, iterated off players’ content to create the next game, delivered a weekly broadcast (Twitch) interacting with players and the new gameResult and impact
Total 1,549 downloads across all the games released on itch (making for an average of roughly 78 downloads per game)
124 creations (maps, poems, images, etc) submitted by solo players and hosted on the core site. (ie this doesn't include poems, maps, drawings and quilts generated by twitch viewers)
Pieces of participant feedback to reflect impact:
"There was a thing I wrote, a passing word, that was picked up and used in streams and emails. The flutter of joy each time I heard it was wonderful, as was seeing other contributions flower in the world."
"I loved the general feel of all the games. Building on The Map Way In was amazing, the cairn-marked path is very well thought, I loved the poems because it was simple, short and fun, but I also liked having the opportunity to write longer pieces and create more."
"I did not expect everything to be linked together in this way (both between the games, between the players and in my environment), it was really fun to be part of this."
Reflection and improvement
The project was to facilitate escapism and connection during the height of lockdown - it was really rewarding to design solo experiences that nonetheless felt like part of a wider community. I became more comfortable creating emergent narrative, and felt confident and competent creating mechanically driven story via TTRPG elements from dice rolls to deck-building.