• Platforms: Real Life, Discord, News Article, Reddit, Digital Documents, Audio Files, Board Game

• Development Period: February 2023 — May 2023

• My Roles:  Graphic Designer, Narrative Designer, Systems Designer, Level Designer, Sound Designer

In a nutshell, HoneyMoon is a solo project and alternate reality game about a phenomenon in which the Moon is discovered to emit its own radio waves. These signals then cause mutations in some honeybees, which seek out and sting humans and inject a virus that gradually replaces their nervous system with a new one, effectively killing and replacing them with something nearly identical (but a little off). This grander narrative concept is packaged as multiple stories distributed across anywhere from six to ten different platforms total (depending on where one draws the line between certain platforms). Emphasis is placed on roleplaying, teamwork, and the idea that even after "losing" the ARG, one can still have fun and have an impactful presence in the story. As it was designed to be run at Champlain College, it contains certain time and context-sensitive elements that would need tweaking before use elsewhere.

Documentation

While planning HoneyMoon, it quickly dawned on me that tracking an ARG's many moving, separate-yet-interconnected parts was a complex administrative task. Additionally, schedule constraints during development meant that it made more sense to craft the plans for an ARG in addition to its experienced components (some of which could only exist in plan form for this project), so that I could hand anyone this project and they would be able to conduct it as intended. Using Google Docs (and Google Drive to organize everything), I created a Core Reference Document to track my thoughts and serve as a navigation hub for the bulk of the platforms. When I returned to the project to expand upon it, I created a separate Expansion Document to lay out the relatively complex new board game platform, which also covered the new audio clips for organization's sake.

Graphic Design

Beyond behavior, giving the "infected host" players a distinctive aesthetic was a helpful part of making them eye-catching and interesting to prospective players. To that end, I used Adobe Illustrator to develop a distinct and deeply meaningful logo for their community — seen at the top of this page — which is dissected in detail in the Core Reference Document. The slick smoothness of the shapes and the color scheme used for the logo went on to inform the design of other host-related media, namely the fake school club posters seen above.

Level Design

The advent of the "Beefriend" board game platform and its intersection with the ARG's roleplay elements necessitated the creation of multiple board layouts (seen above) which could be brought to live events, shuffled around, and used to the benefit of high replay value. I took this idea further with the concept of HoneyMoon having final bosses in the form of the six leader hosts that would also act as administrators for the project out of context. Each of the "Six Phases" was made a unique board layout of their own, and they could only be challenged by non-host players that have collected the ten journal entries prior. Like most visual elements of HoneyMoon, the boards were created in Adobe illustrator.

Narrative Design

Storytelling was the main focus of HoneyMoon, bar none. In particular, my goal was to create an immersive system wherein amusing, exciting opportunities for exploration and roleplay could occur for all players. This was somewhat challenging, as players could enter into the game from a variety of different points, some attracted by a public event and others stumbling across an online platform. Moreover, if the game were to grow sufficiently, some players would be "hosts" bodysnatched by the mutant bees, and others would be "competing" with them, while avoiding infection themselves. To streamline the roleplaying experience as much as possible (thereby bolstering its retention rate and immersion) I shaped the context around the mechanics to account for circumstances that would ordinarily threaten to break immersion. For example, a host player growing bored of the ARG and leaving could be read in the context of HoneyMoon as that host reaching its "imago" state, wherein they cease to display the symptoms that set them apart from normal people and become "true" copies of the people they replaced. On the other hand, newly-appointed hosts would be sent a heavily-contextualized Culture Template document, which informs them of the rules they would need to follow as a host.

Sound Design

When I returned to HoneyMoon with the intent of giving it a more pronounced ending, I decided it was important to build on what was already established and set the stage for the final push, in a more cinematic and straightforward way than before. To make this happen, I decided to create two short audio files: one to open the final act, and another to close it. To jibe with the uncanny feel of HoneyMoon, as well as its recurring element of radio signals, I used AI voices to read out the scripts I wrote, and imported them into Adobe Premiere Pro to add radio filters to the spoken lines, as well as appropriate ambience based on the speaker.

Systems Design

Intersecting somewhat with narrative design, a vital part of the HoneyMoon experience was the gradual progression from platform to platform, and I had to make sure that no one platform was too isolated from the others. In transmedia development, I employ the terminology of "gateways" and "corridors", the former denoting platforms that are conducive to attracting new audience members, and the latter referring to platforms that are accessible/enjoyable to people already familiar with a gateway. The board game platform was the other notable systems development in the ARG; I needed a straightforward, punchy game to serve as a casual activity at HoneyMoon public events. Ultimately I used the simple conceptual design of HoneyMoon's mutant bees (whose bodies are little more than a round ball and long stinger) to serve as inspiration for a novel core mechanic wherein each pawn piece has two components that occupy two spaces and perform different functions. These mechanics can be seen in detail in the Expansion Document.