Roles: Game Designer, Programmer Tools: Twine Team Size: 3 Date: Summer 2019 Description:
DeNovo is a non-linear visual novel set in 1950 Great Britain, where players take on the role of a court member, deciding on characters fates through capital punishment.
It is roughly based on true crimes.
Main Goals
Prompt
Create a non-linear game with at least 2 different endings and branching paths
Project Goals
Balance: creating a story heavy game filled with tough moral decisions, without throwing paragraphs of text at players
Routine: going through case files shouldn't feel monotonous despite using the same mechanics
Impactful: overcoming tool limitations to make an impactful and visually appealing game that could stand out
Challenges & Takeaways
Text Overload
Initially, DeNovo had multiple pages that incorporated large blocks of text.
This felt overwhelming and jarring to playtesters, since pages would jump between small blocks and large blocks of text.
In the first iteration, text was left in large chunks.
We looked into subtitling, and how text is displayed in other games to try and find a balance that could work.
To fix this, we ended up using a textbox section that was limited to only a couple lines of text at a time.
Afterwards text was spaced out to be a couple lines at a time.
Proper Flow
We had a hard time balancing out gameplay in DeNovo to make it not feel tedious.
Since there is so much dialogue, there is a lot to go through as a player as they have to click to continue the conversation every couple lines.
But the biggest problem was other gameplay elements feeling redundant.
There was too much clicking the player had to go through to get to each new section of the game.
We had the issue of our tutorial cases feeling too long to go through, as each time the player clicked one, it would describe the actions needed to be taken.
We fixed this by removing the multiple iterations of the tutorial text, and integrating only the key information into the scene.
First Iteration used repetitive tutorial statements for each file. Final version used simple instructions. Flow comparison between the first and final iteration of case interactions.
Additionally, we added an interaction scene with the player's desk prior to interacting with case files to reinforce the actions needed through gameplay instead of all text.
Desk scene acted as a tutorial for interacting with case files in a similar manner.
Tool Limitations
Going into the project, we wanted to try and push the limitations of the twine engine.
Most games we had seen at the time were simply text based, since twine is limited to just html/css and javascript code.
But with proper research of the code documentation, we worked hard to iterate on the look and feel of the game.
We all worked together to design the interface and make DeNovo feel similar to other visual novel style games.
First iteration of DeNovo. Scaling felt awkward, and the name of the speaker was always inside the textbox. Current iteration of DeNovo. Name tags are more clear, and everything is fit to scale.
Another limitation of Twine was being limited to one person working on the project at a time.
To get over this, it was important to communicate effectively with all of the team members.
All updates to the game were saved as separate files, as a means of version control in case of any overlap.
