VIDEO GAME
Project: Ambrosia (Working Title) is a sidescrolling 2D stealth narrative video game I am currently working on. It attempts to mix Outer Wilds' mechanistic ingenuity and Disco Elysium's literary brilliance, in hopes of making a narrative experience that can only be truly played once. You play as a coal mafia boss, awaiting news on a job that will change the course of the penal colony turned free city of Chalcutt, when you realize that you have been reliving the same 20 minutes over and over again, the same 20 minutes before you get assassinated. Try to prevent your death, as you look back on your life and see what kind of man you truly turned out to be.
(Name TBD)
PROJECT: AMBROSIA
Game Director | Writer | Game Designer
Dark and Somber | Tense | Depressing
Play the Twine Protype Here:
(WARNING: THIS IS AN OLD VERSION MEANT TO DISPLAY THE LITERARY STYLE. THIS IS NOT MEANT TO SHOWCASE THE ACTUAL GAMEPLAY)
AWARDED the Feather Grant by gradCapital as funding to develop the game.
Story Overview and My Work
>WRITING the entire story of the game, while BUILDING an ORIGINAL STEAMPUNK WORLD with ORIGINAL LORE to support the story.
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>So far, the script is 10k words long, with a TWINE DEMO meaning to serve as a PROTOTYPE available.
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> The game uses the player's KNOWLEDGE of the protagonist Coyel's life as a CENTRAL MECHANIC. There is a main solution to escaping the loop that the player must figure out through their knowledge of the world and their life which they gather as they explore their penthouse and the city in each loop.
> The main problem I encountered while writing the story is making it harmonious with the ludonarrative, the gameplay. The idea of exploring and looking back at your life seemed at odds with the high stakes gameplay of preparing against your assassin in the 20 minutes leading up to your assassination.
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>As a solution, I tied the PREPARATION GAMEPLAY to the knowledge of the world. To prepare against the assassination, the player must know more about how to navigate the world around them.
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>To reconcile the gap in knowledge Coyel and the player have, I added the element of an UNRELIABLE NARRATOR who serves as the main antagonist of the game. The narrator is a facet of Coyel's mind, but it is clear that it cannot be trusted.