It Never Ends - Design Process

   Project Overview

Team size: 5

My roles: Project Manager, Narrative Designer, Programmer

Development time: 5 months

Project type: College projecthtt

Platform: PC

Tools: Unity, Ink, Visual Studio, Miro

Gameplay Video

Short Description

It Never Ends is a 2D story-driven game about confronting Depression, a monster that personifies depression. 

The game puts an emphasis on player agency both in gameplay and story. 

It is important to note that this game is an MVP (minimum viable product), not a full-fledged game.

My Roles and Responsibilities

I was the project manager, narrative designer, and a programmer:

• As the project manager, I made sure that we were on track every day during production, helped facilitate weekly meetings, and worked with my teammates to make sure the final experience is cohesive and impactful. 

• As the writer, I initially wrote all the dialogues in the game and was the main member responsible for the narrative. However, over the course of production, I worked with my teammates to re-write the dialogues based on player feedback. Even though those revisions significantly changed them compared to what I wrote at first, they made the game much better overall.

• As a game designer, I worked with my team to define the rules of the game and create an impactful story. One of the most important tasks I completed as this role was creating the first two sketches of the game’s map. 

• And finally, as a programmer, I was responsible for implementing the title screen and pause menu and fixing various bugs, both minor and major.

Design Process

Important note: This part is about the process of designing this game with a focus on the narrative.

The Goal

Our goal was to show how depression affects people and the main ways in which they react to it.

The Constraints

• The short development time (as required by the assignment's criteria) 

• The small scope of the project

The Main Challenges and the Solutions

• Believability of the characters and the world: 

To make the story feel more realistic, we set the game in a nightmare that is happening inside the protagonist's head every night. This helped us focus on developing the world and the character of Depression without worrying about the unrealistic nature of depicting the disorder as a monster. However, we still had to do a large number of iterations and playtests to make sure the conflict felt real.

• Offering meaningful choices: 

The game's dialogues are non-linear and as a result, lead to 2 different consequences. However, the impact of the first one is very limited because it only resets the night (level) and adds an additional line of dialogue to Depression. Despite our efforts to make this choice more meaningful, we decided to not make changes due to our limited time and small scope. However, we created more opportunities for choices by creating and placing optional interactable objects over the map and 2 different guns during the fight with Depression. Nevertheless, none of them introduced drastic changes and as a result, created a linear story that offered some choices on the surface level. This was acceptable in our case due to the fact that this was an MVP and not a full game, but it taught me the important lesson that choices should always have clear and visible consequences in order to be seen as "meaningful" by players.

This is a diagram that I created during pre-production that shows the player choices and their consequences at a high level: