Excited to share "Tome of Choices", a prototype narrative game powered by Gemini AI 2.5.
This project explores branching storytelling and player agency, built to test how acoustic models can shape interactive experiences.
Try it here: Tome Of Choices
It’s an early build, but I’d love to hear your thoughts: What choices did you make, and how did the story unfold for you?
Fun fact: your choices will define your path, and you might meet other players (hopefully there would be other players, lol) who made the same choices as you. It's like 'finding your own tribe' kind of thing. :)
Side note: the game mostly focuses on psychoanalysis in a high fantasy setting, and yes it was inspired by D&D ;)
Squirrely Roo at a Writing conference? It's more likely than you'd think! 🤔 💭
Though playing Squirrely Roo Rabbit may not feel like reading, it still depicts a story to you, player!
As a #StoryGame, the narrative drives the mechanics and the content of each level in a larger context. But why doesn't it feel like reading? Well, games as an interactive medium have a unique requirement of having the "reader" perform—and sometimes even decide—the story, providing a unique and often innovative lens to the storytelling medium 🤓
At the IWCA annual conference this weekend, we're looking at the expansive ways writing can be used to communicate! 💬💭🗯
Welcome to the official blog by developers of “C.L.A.Y. - The Last Redemption”! We are MiTale, an indie gamedev team from Finland, with huge passion for narrative-driven experiences and utilizing gaming technologies in variety of scientific and educational fields.
C.L.A.Y. – The Last Redemption is a story-driven rpg, set several generations after the collapse of civilization. The survivors of the apocalypse live in tribal societies and tell stories of the day the cities came alive and devoured all who lived in them.
The apocalypse was caused by C.L.A.Y, a ubiquitous AI-enhanced smartmass that was used to build, enhance or modify nearly everything in the pre-apocalypse; whole cities were built with it, as were drones, vehicles and weapons. No-one expected the AI that controlled the mass would learn to hate humanity.
In the post-apocalypse, C.L.A.Y. lives on both as a curse, in the insane clay golems that hunger for human blood, and as a blessing, as some have learned to control it through ritual and alchemy.
We are having weekly Twitch streams by Natasha Skult, feel free to join her art production process LIVE on Wednesdays from 6PM EEST!
Today marks the end for the Narrative unit, you’ll find in the following GiFs the vertical slice(60 second gameplay) of the game I designed.
As the player you’re initially drawn towards the light from this lantern. I placed a particle effect on the object to not only draw the player towards it but also to let them know this is significant, and that you can interact with it.
Initial Start.
Once you have the Lantern you’re able to use it as a way to shoo off the “Coyotes”(Menacing dog thing) so you can move further into the cave to progress.
A hole in the wall designed to lead the players eye to the goal of rescuing the Dog, using light and the same particle effect used on the lantern to draw the players eye.
My favourite part of this game is the bridge. As you cross the bridge, the audio sounds as if it about to break, it breaks in. And then a splash audio track plays as you hit the ground.
The goal of this game is to rescue Marigold(your pet dog) who has been injured somehow. This is known to the player by the whining dog audio track that players once near Marigold. Then you leave the cave, with marigold.
Other notes:
-I used the colour grey to lead the player through the level, even though the level may seem pretty straight forward I felt it needed to be more understandable for the players.
- Also used water droplet particle effects to lead the player, and also emphasize the cold, dampness of the cavern.
- A stream was also in place at first for enviroment art, but then I used it to lead the player in the right direction also. This was a tricky bit, as I created the shader in shaderforge, and making the water move was perhaps to technical for me at the time, but with the help of a couple of tutorials and assistance of my teacher, I worked it out.
Overall this unit was enjoyable, but only covering the basics of narrative design in class really gave me a broad scope of what I wanted to create, and how I was going to implement it. Next time I need to keep focusing on Pre-Production more, as it’s easier to fail on paper and iterate, rather then in the editor window.
Earlier in the year, I did an analysis on Journey, I spoke about its Loops, MDA and everything that I absolutely loved about it.
Now we’re looking at it in class and through a different set of lenses, I thought I would revisit this amazing game, just for a moment.
Journey is a masterpiece, it has changed the way I play games, the way I approach game design and ultimately set the bar very high for anything to do with games.
Looking at it through the eye of Narrative Design, there were a few things I missed the first time around. We also talked about it being a direct correlation to “The Hero’s Journey”, the monomyth created by Joseph Campbell to talk about the stages of narrative development. Which in itself was fascinating.
1. The colour transition. I noticed the colours changing, of course, but I hadn’t looked at it as a way of differentiating between levels. It never clicked that the colours were there to invoke an emotional response, I thought it was purely a level design choice.
2. The Fade to White transitioning to a Fade to Black. The fades are used to go from level to level. Or, as thresholds (newly acquired word as of today!), and the fade to white is used throughout the whole game except for one occasion; the section where the player is supposed to feel helpless. All is lost, the low-point in the story, or otherwise known as the “Belly of the Beast”.
3. That it pretty much directly follows the 12 stages of narrative design. It is a mirror of the construct in such a way that feels right. It doesn’t feel like it’s been made that way, it doesn’t feel like anything is out of place.
You all saw our (semi-redacted) script in our last post, but the words alone cannot encapsulate how a story is shared in a visual medium. These emotes are intended to enhance the animated interactions between characters, but especially those of our shy hero, Squirrely Roo! ✨🙈🌟
