First Fable's train game cutscenes

Overview

In a small group called "First Fable", we created a minimal environmental-storytelling-centric game, where I was in charge of the opening and ending cutscenes to tie the story together. I also came up with most of the storyline on the large scale.

The story begins by seeing a pine-tree-filled hilly and grassy landscape with a river, featuring stylised clouds and a prominent raised train track. A magpie flies out from among the trees and soars through the sky, over the river and past the track. We soon see a train loudly crossing through, chugging smoke as it goes. After the train turns a corner, the magpie flies alongside the train and tries to enter through a window, and ends up smashing through. This breaks its wing, and then gameplay would begin.

In-game (not shown here), the magpie (controlled by the player) would go around and search for seeds in the environment to recover the magpie's strength enough to fly back away. The intention was to get help on where to find the seeds by listening to NPC dialogue in text form, going between rich and poor cabins and hearing of the economic struggles and imbalance from each class of passengers (including concern over the cost of the broken window and so on). The discourse would inadvertently make the magpie obsessed with money too, and it would subconsciously start eating coins instead of seeds, with exactly when to make the switch determined by how much attention was paid by the player to what item they're interacting with. Either way, it would soon die of poisoning from eating the coins.

Finally, the outro cutscene slowly reveals that the world the game takes place in is a plastic toy set being played with by a child; the magpie is a plastic toy, the wide open sky is just a box with a lightbulb poking through it for a sun, and the train is a toy being pushed by a child's hand. The bird could never recover its wing because it was a piece of plastic, so gathering coins to buy a new one was its best chance.