We Should Totally Stab Caesar!

Project Overview:

A 2 week make, a character-focused historical comedy horror 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 design

Writing

Writing scripts & all supporting material, image editing, researched Roman society maintaining historical accuracy & developing clear text-only characterisation, maintaining comedic tone & historical accuracy, developed inventory and player choice tracking systems using Harlowe, generated around 30k words for the story, including 5 clear locations, 10+ unique characters, and 4 different endings.

Process and approach

Process

Came up with the joke, did a lot of research on Rome at the time of Caesar’s death, sketched out the characters and the locations, decided on the ending, decided on the “units of time structure”, and then wrote it all in one go. Showed a software development professional who taught me some more information about how to make a game, iterated, made some supporting images in Pixlr, then released the game.

Approach

I did it to create a work as self-education - I plotted out everything on notecards, and then just started making things in Twine, learning Harlowe and CSS as I went.

Tools and technologies

Harlowe, Twine, Googledocs, CSS

Sample of work

https://hannahraymondcox.itch.io/stab-caesar

Team collaboration

Taught CSS and Twine by software development professional

Result and impact

1,500 unique engagements on Itch.io (more over festival dates not counted by analytics)

Exhibited at Now Play This 2022 - Festival for Experimental Game Design @ Somerset House

Delivered talk to live and online audience on politics of narrative design

Game used by Progress Youth Theatre to teach the period, playthrough by Youtuber PaxRomana

Reflection and improvement

I learned a lot about programming, ambition, and scoping. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, which led to a very messy back end that would have been improved by a day counter. It was crazy. But I’m still really proud of the writing and design - I took historical accuracy, and historical comedy, and still managed to convey the horror of stabbing someone to death. I also loved diving into historical documentation to inform the worldbuilding documents e.g. a lost dog poster!