Game studies and LIA! host dinner featuring ENG328 student game showcase
The dinner featured playthroughs of five interactive narratives, each with a unique take on storytelling and game design.
On March 25, the faculty of the game studies program and Literature is Alive! (LIA!) held a dinner event that allowed attendees to play through five games developed by students of ENG328: Writing for Games and Narrative Design. During the event, each of the game designers gave a brief presentation on their game before allowing attendees to play through it, after which they answered questions from the audience.
The ENG328 students developed their games in the Twine 2 engine, a relatively beginner-friendly tool that doesn’t require deep coding knowledge to create interactive narratives. Most of the student developers had not coded before, and this was their first fray into game development.
The first three games were all somewhat standard visual novels, each with a unique twist. What Lies Beyond is a visual novel that explores the paths of four characters as they go on their journey through the afterlife, accompanied by a mysterious being that seems to know all about them. It featured a creatively sketch-like art style and a clever way to pick each character, with each of the opening choices of dialogue leading the player down each character’s story.
Following this was Floor 49, a more horror-centric game that revolved around a protagonist attempting to get to their room through a seemingly haunted elevator. The game featured several rules meant to frustrate the player and snail-paced dialogue, making it so that each time the player made a wrong choice and got a bad ending, they would have to start again from the beginning, making each attempt more and more frustrating.
The last of the three visual novels was Pretentious Actor Simulator, which is completely text-based. The game itself focuses on a theatre actor as he takes on his first real role in a play, with dialogue options that range from friendly to pretentious. The game also features a hidden counter that keeps track of all the dialogue choices the player makes. At the end, it tallies up the points to decide which of the three endings the player receives.
The fourth game was Arkruine, which is technically a visual novel but more resembles a party-based role-playing game. The game follows two seemingly robotic characters as they make their way through a ruined ark, with an elevator-like structure leading to different floors, each representing a different part of the story. It also features a dice-based combat system, where the player wins by rolling a higher number than enemy non-player characters.
The last game of the batch was Workaholic Simulator, which is a more typical visual novel like the first three games, but differs by having the attributes of the player displayed on the top left of the screen. As the player navigates their way through their career, each choice they make affects their character’s attributes, like losing MP (short for “mental points”) when making a decision that taxes the character mentally.
Overall, the event highlighted a powerful range of creative visions, with students from different backgrounds showcasing how they brought their narratives to life. While the games were limited by the system they had to present themselves in, it was ultimately these restrictions that gave each of them their own unique identity and made them memorable.
