Would You Like Some Limbs

You can download and play the game on itch!

For the main project in my second semester at the UE Berlin we had to make a narrative game - something that tells a story.
After some prototyping, a group was formed around the idea of making a game about being a salesman for prosthetic limbs in a cyberpunk future.

​My role on this team emerged to be a sort of moderator, vision keeper and narrative designer. Trying to facilitate communication between the strong characters in our team was a challenge, especially as we had just moved all university activity online with the corona-pandemic hitting us at the very start of the semester. But through communal brainstorming exercises and many visualizations via the online-whiteboard miro, we slowly got to a common understanding of what we wanted to achieve with the game. The goal was to create a game, in which the player would have to sell limbs in order to feed the family - with the family getting further and further alienated with every sale. The crux: There would be a point where the player needs to decide between selling their own human limbs in order to stay afloat, slowly taking away the player's ability to properly sell prosthetics, or sell other peoples human limbs, alienating the family in the process.

first narrative brainstorming

The first game loop visualized as a flow chart

Figuring out though what exactly we would be able to achieve in one semester took long enough. The first plan was to make the game a repeating loop of the sale with the decisions made there affecting the player and their family - similar to the indie hit "Papers Please!": A more slowly, possibly branching emerging story. But it took us longer than expected to really etch out exactly how that would look like, so we pivoted away to a more linear narration.

I used two different models to discuss my narrative ideas: The Freytag-Pyramid and the Story Circle (as popularized by Dan Harmon). It was really helpful to use the structures, especially for communication - making clear why the story beats have to happen in a particular order. I used the Freytag-Pyramid in particular to help me construct a first game loop for us to develop: A single sale with consequences, to see if all the systems work, upon which we could then iterate.

With the first loop working, I set out to sketch the rest of the story. My approach was to lay down a complete structure of every single interaction and dialogue, to fill that out after I have formed the overarching narrative on paper.
I would consider each game loop as a dot on the Story Circle - and the overarching narrative then the completed circled consisting of the smaller game loops. This approach was helpful for letting me come from a big picture perspective and laying out the dramaturgy in a way that was easy to communicate and iterate on!
My biggest issue with it was, though, that it made me feel as if I were way further along with my progress than I actually was. I had hoped that with a set structure the writing of the actual dialogue would be easy-peasy - which, as it turned out, it certainly wasn't.

One dot on the larger narrative structure

The narrative structure completely zoomed out

In the end I had to write all of the dialogue over the course of three days. And as I was writing it, as I was in the thick of it, I found issues and inspiration for iterations on the overall structure. Midway, I developed voices for the characters - but it was too late to go back and form each character into a cohesive shape. The writing turned out fine, the dialogues still communicated the necessary. But there was little to no time for narrative polish: I would have loved to iterate on the dialogoue, to discuss where the emotions I wanted to get across fell flat and so on. The big learning here: Narrative Design needs to be playtested just as much as any other system as well.

Nevertheless, I am very happy with what we did as a team. It was the first digital game I have ever worked on, and I am quite proud of the result. Not only on the narrative side, but also on the sound and visual design side. The sounddesign, the soundtrack I helped with and the skyscrapers I built turned out very interesting, with lots of character - and lots of learnings about noise, rhythms and reflections in Unity.