The Death of Big Bad Wolf

Role: Developer

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Objective: To take a linear narrative – the fairy tale: The Three Little Pigs – and turn it into a simple non-linear interactive experience where a player can play the story in any order and still understand the narrative, background, and be invested in the final story choice.

 

Approach: There were two key focuses when developing ‘The Death of Big Bad Wolf’. First, rather than tell the story in a traditional fashion, I set the narrative as a detective story, giving the player a reason to choose which ‘crime scene’ to explore first. This allowed me to develop three separate scenes which can be played in any order. Only when the player has investigated all three crime scenes can they move on to write their report and finish the game.

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The second was to make the characters that the player meets memorable and differentiated. Detective stories are driven by the people you investigate and the player should feel that they are meeting and speaking to a diverse and entertaining cast. I worked to develop a unique way of speaking and a tone of voice for each of the characters.

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Design Process: In order to design the player’s choices and the structure of the story, I began by mapping out the key story beats and key choices in a flow chart (below). From there, I filled in the key information the player would need to know to finish the story, and ensured that this could be discovered in a number of different ways to make certain the player could get the full story no matter which choices they made.

 

Once the flow chart was clear, I built out the characters and the conversations with each.

It was important to me that the player felt they were driving the story throughout. So all choices or actions that progress the story are actions that the player (as the detective) is taking. Every time the player clicks they are performing an action or making a choice, no matter how mundane.

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To play on Itch.io click here

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