Meddlesome Company

The original script, being intended for a film, had Anthony as the central character and Theo as the deuteragonist, with both sides of the story were shown simultaneously by switching between their perspectives. This would be much more difficult to implement in a game, so we decided to split the story into three chapters: Anthony's perspective up to a certain point; Theo's perspective up to the same point; and a finale chapter going to the end of the story. Anthony's and Theo's chapters can be played in any order, but the finale must be played last. This would allow the player to experience each protagonist's side of the story in a more authentic way.

Narrative & Interaction Design

As the focus of the course and project were on narrative, we designed the game interactions to match the characters' actions and experiences in the story. A large part of the story is Anthony's and Theo's actions bringing consequences for each other and themselves, so I wanted the player to participate in making these mistakes and share some of the protagonists' feelings.

For example, early in the story, Anthony's overconfidence causes him to make a mistake when using a new software to update a database, and he has to fix it later on. For the first part, I made the interaction a simple drag and drop where the player drags coloured shapes into the matching coloured slots.

The interaction for fixing the database is almost exactly the same, but with an added a toggle that displays silhouettes of the shapes in the slots, and the player drags the objects based on the shape rather than the colour. This shows the simple mistake Anthony made the first time, and gives the player a sense of responsibility as they had participated in making the mistake.

We also wanted to design more complex and interesting interactions to keep players engaged, and faced the challenge of balancing the inclusion of these with the limited time we would have to develop and implement them. Our approach to this was to brainstorm ideas for interactions, simplify them as much as we could without losing their appeal, and judge how doable they were based on our skill with Unity and what other areas we would need to learn. We then moved forward with the ideas that we thought we could implement in the time frame with little trouble.

Layout Design

In a shared Figma file, I designed the basic layouts of all the rooms in the map. This included deciding what rooms we needed, what important objects needed to be present in each room based on the gameplay interactions there, and where the objects would be located in the room.

In addition to the layout of objects within each room, I also had to consider how the rooms would be connected, where to place the doors that led to other rooms, and how intuitive it would be for players to make their way around the map. I did my best to keep the continuity of movement direction—for example, if a player was likely moving to the right when entering a room, they would keep moving right to go further into the room, and left to go back to the door to exit.

Development

In the game development, I programmed the player movement and controls during gameplay. This includes the finale chapter, where the player can swap between controlling the two protagonists, with some interactions being unique to the character.

I also implemented various mechanics and interactions, including but not limited to: the shooting and blocking when hacking into the vault door in each chapter, the chase sequences where the player runs from a guard and jumps over NPCs, cutting wires of a power box in the correct order, and sneaking through a hall by luring and hiding from guards.