Tick Our Time Away
Designer | Writer | Editor
Overview
Tick Our Time Away is a text adventure murder mystery game set in Victorian England. The player takes the role of a college student who posses a pocket watch that can transport him back in time, he must use this power in conjunction with investigative techniques to solve the murder of his professor.
Tick Our Time Away was made as an academic project at DigiPen Institute of Technology for the Narrative Design II class.
What I did:
- Took part in the concepting and design of the plot and systems of the game.
- Wrote and edited dialog and description text, with a focus on the main character and his foil character.
- Created a modular ending monologue.
Accomplishments:
After each team presented. The students, faculty, and industry guests present voted for awards in multiple categories. Tick Our Time Away won four out of the five awards, including “Best Characters” and “Best in Show”.
Roles: Narrative Designer, Writer
Genre: Mystery, Drama, Text Adventure
Engine: articy:draft X
Platform: PC
Team size: 5
Production length: ~6 weeks
Process
Pre-production
After creating a plot outline we got to work on a gameplay system that incorporated investigation and time travel.
I helped make decisions about how much and what kind of gameplay there would be, I then helped create the game logic and constraints.
The system limited time travel to a number of uses, making the mechanic engaging while still being within scope.
Text document where the system was hammered out.
Flow chart of Act 2, showing the system in use. See full image.
Description and casting of main character.
Prototyping
We cast each character as an actor, tying a literal face and voice to a character made writing them in a unique literary voice easier.
We decided on the plot details and began writing, I primarily worked on the main character and his foil character.
An example of how the world reacts to the character.
Production
The main character’s arc has him going from selfish and immature, to responsible and selfless.
Juxtaposition between the main character’s self-important attitudes and the more grounded characters dealing with him created humor and kept the character likable.
Production cont.
Hostility between the foil and the main character is shown through argumentative dialog and the main character suspecting the foil despite little evidence.
The foil’s branching dialog is the hardest to get evidence out of, as there were several choices that lead him to refusing more dialog, requiring the player to go back in time.
If the player is smart with their choices they can extract useful information and even resolve the conflict between the two, affecting the ending.
Flow chart of the foil character’s dialog branch. See full image.
Polish
Players want to feel like their choices matter, so in addition to the investigation, several callbacks were implemented.
Some callbacks pay off soon, like if the main character practices a joke, others have their pay off much later, like if the player catches the man who slips.
I wrote a modular conclusion monologue where, among a few other things, the main character would be less or more changed depending on the players’ actions.
Choice near the start, and a callback at the end of the game
Flow chart of modular conclusion. See full image.