An Experiment in Gamifying Narratives
I just wanted to revisit and put down in words this concept I had about a year ago and made into a short game that you can play if you click the link below.
You see, whenever I play games or watch a movie, I tend to do it with subtitles on as a habit from childhood where I’d be reading them to pick up languages. I chanced upon Kinetic Typography videos and was instantly spellbound. Comics have always used carefully-chosen fonts and sound-words to increase the impact of a scene but Kinetic Typography brought this to a whole new level with animation.
There is some potential for use of this in games and my theories were as follows —
- Often, cutscenes take up a huge chunk of production budget. I wanted to find out if there can be a use of such techniques that are less of a burden on asset creation but that are still as powerful in driving the narrative across.
- Cutscenes are often non-interactive and offer a break to the player. With kinetic typography, it can be possible to have the player involved in meaningful choices.
- If you can create a meaningful scenario with just words, this can find uses especially in indie/mobile games where file size is an issue and you want to keep your game as small as possible while maintaining a quality bar.
- A picture says a thousand words. Unfortunately, words are cumbersome to read. Would this be a mere novelty or how much of this is tolerable at a go?
I submitted the short story above as an entry for a game jam and received some good feedback. The game is about 15 minutes long which feels a little too draggy for some people and the reception was overall good with regards to the general concept.
I think that with the right theme and atmosphere, a smattering of gameplay that’s similar to this would be ideal to break the pace of the level or even the game genre and to provide some good opportunities for conscious story-branching.
