Chronautical
Play as Jack Pocket, a down on his luck mechanic, as he undergoes a journey of self discovery while searching for the lost star system of Atlantis. During his travels through space and time, he repeatedly encounters Alistair, an eccentric man who seems to know Jack better than he knows himself.
Collect pieces of the Great Machine scattered through space and time, solving a solar system-wide character interaction puzzle to obtain each piece.
Chronautical's world, characters, and tone were created by the team's artist, Aeris Meadows. I joined the team toward the middle of development as a narrative designer and writer. I ended up also doing puzzle design for the game.
Outlines & Scope
For the chapter 1 outline for Chronautical, a big part of what I had to consider was the team's size and the scope. As the sole writer, narrative designer, and puzzle designer, lots of cutting had to be considered. We initially planned to have Chapter 1 completed by December. But we had to cut back on content and chose to instead only create the prologue. Regardless, I still created an outline detailing all of Chapter 1's major plot points.
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We planned to release the game chapter by chapter. The first chapter we release will show the game's time travel mechanic, how to use time travel to solve problems, and social puzzles. For the game's narrative, we set up the protagonist's normal world, the basics of this world's lore, and hint at the game's moral argument.
Chronautical Outline Initial Propsal
Ink & Yarn
Since the start of it's development, Chronautical has used Yarn and it's plugin for Unity to create the game's script. We are quickly discovering, however, as the project became more complex, that it most likely be have been better to create the project in Ink. I had used Yarn so far for the project, but I had started learning Ink as well. But the team decided to switch to Ink. The experience has lend me more familiarity with both programs and given me an understanding of some of the differences between them.
Writing for Time Travel
The most challenging part of this project by far was writing and designing for time travel.
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Before joining the project, I had never written for time travel before and it proved to be a challenging and interesting learning experience. I worked closely with the game's vision holder and the original creator of the world to understand how time travel worked in this nautical sci-fi world. In this world, time travel is normalized in the form of traveling long distances in space in just a few moments. It was akin to something like a giant ship, like the Titanic, traveling across the Atlantic.
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Beyond understanding the logic behind time travel in our game's setting, I also had to consider how NPCs would evolve and change as the player moved through a span of ten years. Some characters didn't change at all, others only changed if the player completed specific actions. Others changed much more significantly simply by the passage of time.
Temperance
I knew that when we made the design decision to change to a ten year span, I really wanted to focus on the arcs of NPCs through how they would change within ten years and how they would change based on world events. I felt that one of the best ways to show an interesting character arc this way was by including a child character who grew up to become a teenager.
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Not only did we get an interesting visual change as Temperance grew, but I wanted to have a very clear change in her character as the world around her experienced tragedy and distress. Temperance's character started as simply her going from optimistic to pessimistic, but has evolved and developed since then. As a child, she idealized the Lab where she wanted to work and wonder at all the interesting artifacts that they inspected. However, after it was revealed that the Lab partook in a cover up that would eventually destroy the entire planet, Temperance's identity and goals were shattered. In her teenage years, Temperance became bitter and pessimistic while acting as the main source of criticism for the Lab.
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With this character, I wanted the player to feel heart broken at having to witness a child's dream being shattered and how that would effect her later in life. It created a more personal perspective on the Lab's wrong doings that had less to do with beaucratic politics (as it was with other NPCs) and instead have a character with a deeply personal and tragic arc.