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This finalist in the IGF student showcase was created by a team of 10 students -- some from Singapore, some from the U.S. -- over the course of eight weeks. You are a lone soldier wandering the aftermath of a great battle. It is the dead of winter and you won't last long in the cold. But you are not alone. The Snowfield represents an attempt to make a simulation-based narrative game according to a special method for developing such games, a method designed to avoid the need for complex A.I. or massive content generation. The idea was not to relying on codified narrative theories or formulas - like three-act structures, etc. - but rather assume "what makes a good story" cannot be systematized and instead must be arrived at organically via extensive user testing. The method involved designing and creating many different "building blocks" - characters, behaviors, and/or objects - that stories could be made out of. Through observation of how players played with them in early builds, increasingly fine-tuned decisions were made that would push towards a final product. In other words, The Snowfield is an experiment in seeing how inverting the traditional relationship between Design and QA can streamline a development process for creating highly improvisational, simulation-based narrative worlds on a tight schedule. |
