Bygone
Game Jam | March to May 2021
Objective
Create a game centered around the theme of "absurdism"
My Roles
Narrative, scripting, world building
Platform
PC
Duration
Three months
Summary of Contributions
In my junior year of college, I took a game design course that spanned over six months. Bygone was our final project. I was in a team of four and we had three months to develop a working prototype. Over the three months, I wrote pages upon pages of storyline, dialogue, and in-depth descriptions of each level. My group bounced from idea to idea and my role was to seamlessly integrate the story with the function of the game. Read on to see this crazy and absurd process!
Timeline
Game Highlights
By collecting lost memories and guided by a ghostly entity, you must achieve enlightenment as you fight against your worst nightmares.
Four levels, one player. Navigate existentialist and Sisyphus-esque woes and make decisions that impact your gameplay. The game's map and narrative progress is based on the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the psychological theory that people tend to be overconfident in their abilities until they realize they're not! The gameplay represents the journey into the depth of knowledge. The game is set in a dark fantasy world, complete with a hellish dark forest, a creepy mountain town, and a grey monotonous plateau. Your goal is to collect memory orbs so you can reach Enlightenment. Be prepared to face difficult decisions and... maybe have an existential crisis. In a good way.
Intro
Top of Mt. Stupid
The Descent
Valley of Despair
Genre
Visual novel, horror, mystery
Intended Audience
Not rated E for everyone; this sucker is 17+
Game Engine
Twine and Adobe XD, originally intended for Unity
Ideation & Inspiration
Because this game jam spanned over three months, you might think: huh, that’s enough time to create a solid story!
NOPE.
Our ideation phase never stopped. We changed our central plotline at least three times and since no one in my group was technologically adept (aka, able to code), our initial goal to build the game in Unity fell through and it turned into a Twine game.
My role was a mixture between project manager and narrative designer. By the end of the jam, I had written three separate GDDs! There is so much to this game and there are so many intricate details. Let’s start with explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect:
As soon as we began brainstorming, my group latched onto the popular psychological theory.
In a nutshell, the cognitive theory states that people who aren't very good at something will think they're better than they really are. For example, someone may think they're very good at cooking, but they're really not. On the graph, this person would be standing on the peak of Mt. Stupid. Then, this person realizes they really know nothing about cooking and plummets into the Valley of Despair. Gradually, the person will take steps to master cooking and be on their way to enlightenment. Simple enough?
Once we understood the theory, we decided the game's levels and physical map would follow the slopes of Dunning-Kruger effect graph. The player would get to experience the theory in all its crazy glory. Pretty deep, right? It only gets darker from here. Let's move on to the games that inspired our narrative decisions and aesthetics.
After looking at these games and researching the Dunning-Kruger effect, we set out to cement our narrative. This is where it gets chaotic. Like I mentioned above, my group pivoted multiple times and each time we had to adjust the storyline accordingly. If I listed out all our ideations, I'm quite sure I would bore you! For the sake of my sanity and yours, I'll only cover our final ideation.
Let's begin. To show our thought process on the story, here's a content journey map to visually depict our narrative:
Does it look familiar? It's the exact shape of the Dunning-Kruger effect map! Like I said, the storyline is a direct depiction of the events on the graph. It doesn't follow the typical sequence of the 5 stage narrative arc (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), but for our game, we wanted to push outside of the box.
Once we established our content journey map, we storyboarded the initial ideas before I was able to launch into the nitty gritty details of the game lore. Below is our storyboard.
Creating a visual of our story majorly helped us push forward with our lore. This narrative is very complex and it took us weeks to decide what we wanted our players to come away with. Below you'll find descriptions of each level.
hover and click to expand the synopses
Much like life, you don’t know where you’re going. You don’t know how you’re going to get to the end, but that’s just life. You keep moving. We wanted to portray that in the game by using the Dunning-Kruger graph as a story element. However, since our three month deadline was quickly approaching, we never got to develop the game. We were left with two options: put it into Twine or make it into an interactable journey in Adobe XD.
Linked below you'll find my Twine file!
Overall, this game was very challenging to make and I wish we had more time to develop it. I would love to make it into a visual novel type with detailed art, or even make it like Limbo. With the amount of time given, the story is admittedly still not too polished but it was a great experience working with Twine and playing around with the narrative elements.