Silver Tongue

Accept, Reject, Deflect

Silver Tongue is a design exercise with the Storylet style of interactive storytelling where players take the role of an alien on a rescue mission. Players have limited translator responses to work with, and both their available resources and responses to previous events determine which future events they can access. This game was a 2-week project developed with a 3 person team.

Try it for yourself on Itch.io

No download required, runs in browser

As System Designer for Silver Tongue, Kate's goal was to create a system that forced nonoptimal or unintended player choices without being stressful. Her responsibilities included:

Balancing total responses needed to beat the game
Balancing suspicion system
Assisting in encounter writing and results

As Programmer Kate was also responsible for:

Programming the point-buy system for dialogue responses
Programming suspicion system
Programming storylet module handler

System Development

You saunter further into the party, trying to appear like an unassuming human. Interestingly, you quickly notice someone else doing the same. He wears a similar suit and tie to yours, and keeps checking his watch and glancing around nervously, until his eyes and yours meet. He walks over to you. It seems a conversation is inevitable. “Hello, my... friend? Boy, the stars sure are *BERGUNDY* tonight huh?” He winks, then waits for a response. You try to respond, but your translator is out of juice. The lips hang limply on your lower chin as you draw more and more suspicion for your awkward silence. You slink off in shame, the eyes of the whole party on you. You now have 0 ACCEPT(s), 0 REJECT(s), and 0 DEFLECT(s). It feels like everybody is staring at you.

In order to simplify the process for players starting while keeping engagement, Kate decided that players could purchase which responses they could use, but rather than a whole market of varying costs, Kate made the responses a 1:1 point buy system for simplicity.

Initially though players had no difficulty getting to the end of the game. The game has essentially 6 levels, and with the initial 10 points players started with, they had no trouble making it to the end. After analysis, Kate determined players averaged about 7-8 responses per play through. She then tested players with 6 points to buy responses. This made players slightly more concerned about their response count throughout the game, especially if they ever needed to use more than 1 response in an encounter. Paired with the fact that the game doesn't immediately end if players have no responses, but you gain a lot of suspicion if you say nothing, the average player could still beat the game, but would usually have at least one room where they were not ale to say anything. This got the exact panicked but not stressed out response Kate was looking for.

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