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E-Document

The narrative design document above was written and arranged by me on behalf of the team. It is based on ideas and discussions involving the entire team. Much of the art used in the document was made by our 2D and 3D artists. I sought to “unify” these great ideas under a coherent world.

   The main purpose of the narrative design document was for the team, especially the artists and level designers, to lean towards, when looking for inspiration to tell the story and convey emotions by showing it inside the game, while maintaining a general picture of the game world, so the audience is able to connect all the “dots” throughout the game and feel that they all make sense.

   The narrative underwent several changes and iterations during the entire course of the production, which was expected.

   My aim, as narrative designer, was for the gameplay to rely as little as possible on written texts and dialogues, and instead try to utilise discrete but impactful audiovisual means to help the player figure out what’s going on in the game. Of course, this had to go hand-in-hand with our tech efforts and “time budget”, which meant I needed to be ready and able to constantly adapt, compromise original ideas, and seek new solutions to maintain consistency to overall story and character development.

How the mice function as a group and affect the game

Complementary & Functional Trio

Each character has its own strengths and weaknesses. As complexity for a situation increases, a single character will not be enough to overcome the challenge on its own. It will need to work in synergy with other characters and rely on their strengths to complement its own weaknesses. Only by working together and in time learning to trust one another, will they grow stronger as a whole and overcome difficulties.

Character Trio Flexible Tone Adjustment System

Setting the tone and triggering emotions is an important part of reminding the audience about humanity and how it feels to be “true” to oneself.
   The game offers three different and complementary personalities. Each one, while acting out, will be able to set a certain tone for the game. In a linear game like this one, I’m able to choose which character will be dominant in a particular situation and act out its personality, which in turn may evoke a certain emotion.

   In this example, if I want the game to be more comical and satiric, I would give the Mickey character more “screen time” and dialogue lines. However, if I would like to restore some balance and seriousness to the game, I would let the Tickie character take over and perhaps tell Mickey to be quiet.

   The personalities are designed in a way to allow pushing towards a certain emotion, but also to adjust and retract it, whenever neccessary.

   Stopping a character’s current course of action in time, before they start to make too much fool of themselves, will also help to maintain the audience’s respect and positive affection for that character.

All music in the game were made using FL Studio 12.

Main Theme – Plays while in the main menu screen.

Looping Music

“Moving” credits screen BGM (2 loop cycles + 1 non-loop segment).

Peaceful state BGM

Restricted area state BGM (2 loop cycles).

Detected state BGM (2 loop cycles).

Conflict state BGM (2 loop cycles).

I made an attempt to implement adaptive/layered music using FMOD. However, I wasn’t able to get the transitions between layers to sound quite right in-game. Since FMOD was completely new to me, and we had time constraints to consider, we decided not to look further into adaptive music for this project.

However, we used the audio layers in different combinations to best suit the intended general mood of the level.

The theme used in this video is somewhat different from the one in the final release. This sound is more in line with the initial idea we had, which had a darker and more horrifying tone.