Overview: Choose your own adventure story with many branching paths.

Design Goals:

• Take advantage of the choose your own adventure format to create a unique narrative experience.
• Introduce puzzle solving elements where the player must think critically to succeed.

How were they achieved:

• I created 4 unique threads, and the player is exposed to each of them in a random order. The player controls a character with amnesia, and must figure out how to solve each thread. When the player “loses” in a thread, they move on to the next one.
• The player continually loops through the threads until they succeed in each one. The trick is that the player must use information they learned from other threads in different parts of the game. This gives the player an investigative challenge, as they attempt to figure out everything about this character’s past in order to succeed in the present.

Takeaways

• Mapping out a story ahead of time is invaluable for ensuring a cohesive narrative.
• Adding branching paths adds a lot of extra development time, which isn’t always seen by the player. If time/budget is a constraint, it might be better to focus on a curated, over a unique experience for the player.

Team size: Solo

Role: Game Designer, Writer

Project length: 1 months

Tools: HTML, CSS, JavaScript