ExO

x 5

Gamebook

Project Manager

Narrative Designer

Writer

Download

Completed

January 2021 - February 2022

ExO served as an introduction to many things. After a few months of acclimatization, the project format around which the rest of my time at Bellecour would be shaped was now in motion and this first one would be a Gamebook. The guidelines were as followed:

At least 1 Mechanic
C Language
Only text allowed
No sound

Feeling confident and wanting a challenge, I volunteered as Project Manager. The team that would join me was more or less the result of previously made connections and resulted in, dare I say, a collective of very unique individuals composed of 4 game designers including myself and 1 game programmer.

Arena

Before starting the writing or the coding what we needed was an arena where the player would evolve in and offer the best decisions to the player.

So all of us got together and tried to come up with a compelling storyline to follow. Not only that but we also tried to imagine it from a mechanical potential standpoint. So each of us came up with an idea of its own and we then confronted them in order to sort out the best option.

Our final choice was to take our players in Space, as a Stranded on an unexplored planet populated by tribal aliens. We thought that this setting would offer the widest variety of choices and paths to take.

An uncharted world would allow us to immerse the player into an environment of our choosing, an unexplored, wild and possibly hostile one.

Branches

Once the arena was established, the writing could began. As Project Manager my task was thus to coordinate the efforts of those strong individualities and act as the link between them, trying to get the best out of each member.

To do so it was decided to divide the story in 3 main branches, each associated with 1 Game Designer (1 was missing at the beginning of the project).

This way we would decide together on the main story outlines but let each member express themselves through their respective branch rather than going through a potential tedious process of deciding "each and every sentence together".

Although in retrospect this approach resulted in a quite heterogeneous overall writing style, this downside was compensated by the sheer volume and scale of content we were able to produce - myself taking care of one of the branches.

But if additional time was provided than a process of standardization would have probably take place for a more coherent style and standards.

Play the rules

"Only text allowed"

Our dedicated programmer, Axel Lavigne, found a clever way to bypass this last rule. By developping a specific tool through Python that allowed for the convertion of PNG images into a series of colored characters.

Although this represented an additional workload the trade off was more than worth it and allowed for ExO to stand out among its counterparts.