Game Designer
Quest Designer
Writer
Genre : Adventure
Platform : Web-browser
Audience : Enthusiasts of unusual role-playing games
Influences : Papers Please, Thirty Flights of Loving
PROJECT
IndividuAll is a fast-paced experimental adventure game.
The player follows multiple short stories through the various characters living in the harsh world of IndividuAll.
Each story places the player in an everyday life situation where small choices can lead to unexpected results, from the most dramatic to the most absurd ones.
The main city of IndividuAll,
Here, the player can cross paths with other playable characters of the game, who are also "living their own lives".
The park, another key location of the game.
Players can explore this place through the eyes of many characters :
the gardener, the policeman, the engineer, and most importantly...
the dog.
TEAM
The team is composed of 9 persons, a Programmer, 3 Artists, 2 Musicians, a Project Manager and myself as a Game Designer. Some of them work remotely.
TASKS
On this project, I was Game Designer, Quest Designer and Writer.
As a Game Designer, I worked on the initial concept, along with the project manager. Together, we designed the global experience of the game, what we wanted the players to feel and how we wanted to achieve that.
Here is an extract of our Game Concept Document.
I also worked with the 2D artists, making documents (Asset lists for instance) in order to help them in their work.
As a Quest Designer, I designed the storyline of the various characters. We used a branching structure for each scenarios to match with our game pillars : Exploration and Role-Playing and to ensure high replayability.
Here is a character design document which describes the key elements of a character, and his theme.
Each page describes briefly a node in his branching scenario tree, and eventually its specific gameplay.
it also describes the layout of the environment, leaving the artists free to bring it to life.
The play sessions are designed to be very short so each character's fate has to be solved in a matter of minutes. This aspect had a huge impact on how I designed each character, the use of ellipse and narrative devices - like in Thrity Flights of Loving - helped make the storytelling as efficient as possible.
As a Writer, my job was to set up the lore of the game. We wanted multiple characters that crossed paths at different moments in their life. So, I wrote a global timeline of the universe to highlight the important events of the story in the game, as well as a relationship tree that linked together each character of the game.
Here, you can see an extract from our early-state global document that described the relationship between the characters. At different levels of precision, we organized the different stories and the dialogues for each of them.
