Story Lab – Week 12

As the due date for our project fast-approaches final desiscions have to be made that try to find a compromise between high quality and actually achievable.

As I said in my last post, the structure of our project changed dramatically and I was not totally onboard with the change, but over the past week further restructures have occured and I’m am feeling more excited about our project.

Our original idea (up until last week) was to have two major paths, “Cult” (where the player joins the cult and works towards ascension) and “Anti-Cult” (where the player joins the counter organisation and works to take down the cult) with the player choosing at the beginning and having the ability to swap sides as they learned more. With the radical changes it became a single stream with very limited agency (my  biggest gripe), everyone would start in the cult and then join the anti-cult, take down the Cult and the anti-cult would reveal their true intentions. It was basically a straight line with most choices being 100% superficial.

But over the past week we have been re-formatting the story once again to a hybrid of the other two. Now we have everyone start in the cult, get CONTACTED by the anti-cult and told to spy on cult. But the player can now choose to never report back and can (if they choose) be totally devout to the cult and perform the ascension.

Most of the agency comes from my video segments which were partially done when the structure was changed the first time, and I recorded footage that allowed the player to be role-play wanting to ascend as well as not wanting to, as well as cooperate with the cults request for a confession or choosing to refuse if they wish.

Its not done yet, but my task for the next week is to turn these videos into a series of connected slides with various outcomes that will lead to our 4 endings (back up from the planned 2 after last weeks change).

This is probably the best of both worlds, I’d still MUCH prefer two full-fledged streams, but with the time thats left having one stream that splinters into many possible ways through the final third is a good alternative, and most importantly there are no longer desicions being made about your character anymore, EG you are not assumed to be sympathetic to the anti-cult anymore.

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