A Visual Novel-style game with multiple branching narratives.
It was developed in 4 weeks as a part of a project brief to focus on narrative-based games at the National Film and Television School (UK).
Set in 9th Century Eastern Europe, the game incorporates figures from Slavic Mythology.
Playable on itch.io at this link. Alternatively, watch me play through a small part of the game here
To create a branching narrative game around the theme of ‘Nature’ in 4 short weeks, Leshy: Duch Ciemnego Lasu was born.
While simultaneously tackling the brain-bending logic of writing in dialogue trees and branching paths, I set out to make a simple UI-based framework to test the flow of the narrative as it was written rather than wait for more ‘complete’ elements to be in-game before playtesting.
Working with pen, paper, post-it and Unity UI (sorry, I couldn’t keep the alliteration going). Leshy was iterated upon. The game’s prototype became the framework used as a reference for working with voice actors and recording over 2 hours of unique performances. I committed to the visual-novel aesthetic, to make the most of the limited time and art resources, and ensured that the entire player experience was that of a classic ‘choose-your-own-ending’ story.
Leshy has over twenty unique branching paths and six distinct types of endings. Despite some trouble with videos and building from Unity to webGL, I’m proud of how it all came together.
The goals for this project were to :
Deliver a game within four weeks with at least two endings and a theme of ‘nature’.
Design and Plan a game to maximise the strengths of the core team: myself, Alex and Jack (the screenwriters), and Flavia (the Artist).
Learn to direct Voice Actors.
How did we achieve them :
Designed the game to use just a point-and-click mechanic.
Planned to reuse as many assets as possible, reducing the artist's workload.
Structured the development into four sprints:
1: Branching out the script, Building a simple prototyping system, and Scoping out the art requirements
2: Test the narrative, refine the system to include audio, and add UI.
3: Recording and importing the dialogue, adding to the art, and testing builds for PC and web.
4: Polish and Testing, and then more polish.
Takeaways:
Unity web exports are tricky, and I should account for more building time.
If I were to revisit this project, I would focus on adding more ‘movement’ to the visuals.
Playing to our strengths and limiting the mechanical scope allowed us more flexibility with the narrative scope.
Prototyping and testing early helped minimise any wasted time working on assets like art, or with sound.