I wanted you to see the world from different points of view as you grow up in the game: as a child or an adult, as a farmer or a soldier, as a romantic or a rebel.Ī branching narrative wasn’t going to cut it, or at least not just one. For a dynamic open world, we’d need events to occur with or without you there to witness them, and you could pop in on a plotline in the middle of some crisis which might be too late to solve. With our focus on replayability, I wanted players to only see a small amount of the narrative during each life, but without forcing them into one track at a time. Clicking a question mark while exploring will start a story event The Octopus I worked with co-writer and narrative designer Lindsay Ishihiro to produce Exocolonist’s huge and complicated narrative, with approximately 6 novels’ worth of text and 800 triggered events. But for I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, I had a new challenge: to tell a coherent narrative along a 10-year timeline, involving characters who grow up, change dramatically, and may (or may not) even die mid-game. With Rebuild 3, the similarly large 200K word narrative was delivered as an assortment of procedurally generated events involving a post-apocalyptic settlement. I even considered writing a young-adult sci-fi novel instead of this game, but I know my strengths lie in programming and game design, and it would be a waste not to combine them with the story I wanted to tell. I grew up an avid reader and writer before games became my life. I’m Sarah Northway, co-founder of Northway Games and creator of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, as well as the narrative city-building series Rebuild and other games. Not a linear visual novel, but a loose and vast narrative intertwined with deckbuilding and stats raising, dynamic yet deterministic. For our narrative RPG I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, I wanted this: organic worldbuilding, characters with their own lives, replayability, and major events as signposts in a larger narrative space the player can explore. My favorite narratives are ones where the reader – or player – is a participant, taking the author’s text and telling their own stories with it. Solving a mystery in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist How the home-rolled scripting language Exoscript helped us design a flexible open world narrative of nearly 600K words.
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