Embedded Files
In The Minkowski Effect you must use quick wits and a time altering machine to solve complex puzzles while exploring a mysteriously quiet ship.
It is another day in the life for Bryan, an intergalactic adjuster. Tasked with understanding what mysterious events unfolded aboard the Nauticus, Bryan must use his standard issue time altering gizmo to make his way through ship.
Each room that you make your way through becomes more and more complexing, requiring expert use of all the time altering gizmo has to offer.
Project Details
Team of 5
Unreal Engine
Time - 4 Months
Role - Narrative/Level Designer
Pitch
We got our team of 5 and each made pitches. This was the pitch that eventually won out as it had the most promise and gave each role something exciting to do as well. As someone who loves game narratives, I thought that the storytelling potential of this idea was amazing as there were so many different avenues, we could take the game in. Mysteries are usually very hard to write, so I thought that it would be a unique challenge for me to try out.
Another thing that made this pitch so appealing is the fact that our Engineer had already made the time control mechanic [Think Prince of Persia: Sand of Time Rewind], so we thought that choosing this project would give us a leg up and we could really start pumping out a lot more content and story instead.
Production
Echo Night 2: Lord of Nightmares
For the story and gameplay, I took a little inspiration from Echo Night.
Echo Night is a horror series made by FromSoftware which has players exploring an abandoned vessel that's haunted by ghosts. It's only by helping Ghosts pass on do you find out why this vessel was abandoned.
It's a fairly simple premise, but I made a few changes to make it fit with our pitch. In order to fit the theming better I switched Ghosts to AI Black Boxes, which would capture the memories of the people left on the ship. These memories would be in a mix of audio and text memos as it becomes much easier to scale up and down depending on how big we would end up making the game.
This would make it easier on our artists as well as they wouldn't have to create new models for every single character that we wanted to add to the story. Rather than interacting with people aboard the ship we could instead focus on environmental storytelling and have the ship act as the main character.
Also, I made it so that instead of a section of ship having multiple "ghosts", they would just have one or maybe two. This way we could focus on the characters and give them a lot of story beats while keeping in scope of the game.
As the narrative designer on the team what I wanted to do was highlight the gameplay in the way that the story was presented as well. Your character being able to influence the world through small time streams, I wanted the culmination of those small differences to showcase in the story so as a neat little detail, the dialogue of the black box would change to reflect the player's progress in helping a "Ghost" pass away and have tiny differences in the story, such as a dad being replaced with mom, room numbers being variations of one another, and small changes in directions given to the player. The overall story would remain the same
It ties in with the concept of multiverses and how small changes can lead to big changes overtime
As I was writing, I tried to be in contact with the level designer as much as possible so we could be on the same page, and we could influence each other's idea. This worked for a little bit, but work was happening at a snail's pace so we instead decided on key locations that we could work on separately but keep exchanging notes to see if there were any clashes or new ideas that formed for with the story or levels.
As I wrote the VIP characters for each of the levels, I tried to keep a main puzzle in mind when writing for that room. I wanted there to be overlap between what the player must do and how it relates to the problem the person in the Blackbox was facing.
One example I particularly proud of is the story for the casino. At this point in the story the player needs money from the casino in order to upgrade their basic ticket to a First-Class ticket. In that room the VIP they meet is a gambling addict who is trying to win back his daughter's college tuition, so the main puzzle is around cashing out a slot machine 5 times. So at this point you help solve the problem the black box person was going through, solve the issue you have on hand, and tying it into the overall theme and feel of that specific level.
I do have a full synopsis of the game present, which you can scroll through here. Sadly, everything couldn't be put into the game, but I'm happy with the work over here.
As you go through it you can see how there's an overall mission and how the smaller missions pop up in the level as the game goes on. I do think the way you get the missions are slightly repetitive and that's one thing I'd like to fix, so the player isn't solely dependent on the black boxes but use more of the environment to help drive the story forward.
Story_Synopsis_.docxGoogle Sites
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