School Board: the Survival Horror Game

Assignment

As part of The Narrative Department’s game writing class, we were tasked with writing a game centered around a fairy tale.

Creative process

My favorite parts of the process are brainstorming and voice creation. I spent the better part of a day researching fairy tales. I tried to think of interesting combinations of characters and game genres that would work in the format. I built a word document and began to pitch myself ideas (like a tower defense game for Rapunzel, etc.) I love creating ideas and then tinkering with them into combinations or formats I haven’t seen before. 

But then once I have an idea, it’s on to world building and most importantly, character creation. Who would be the protagonist for the game? Who would be the antagonist? Who would provide necessary exposition? I then try out the numerous voices that could work for the specific characters. Would an unhinged Goldilocks be fun to play as? What about a scared one? These dialogue test drives require me to open a screenwriting application and see what excites me about a game. I may not use 90% of what I write in this stage, but it helps me understand the characters and what kind of conflict I’m building. 

As an example, I started writing a stealth choose-your-adventure revenge tale about Little Red Riding Hood. I enjoyed the premise and even found my way into some characters that I liked to write— especially the entire wolf family that the protagonist would seek out to destroy. But ultimately, I didn’t feel like the experience was what I wanted to convey. This wasn’t wasted time, because it helped show me what did and did not work for the format.

Mechanics

As the sole creator for the project, I had to center the most inflexible aspect of the game (the mechanics) and from there, figure out what kind of experience I wanted to create. I decided that my limited knowledge of Twine could be an asset here and leaned into what kind of activities require choices and how to build on those choices to tell the player a story. I’ve always wanted to create one of those old “town hall”/”mayor sim” type text games I played as a kid, and so I aimed for that… with a twist.

Experience: I wanted to both skewer the modern political climate with allegory and create an unsettling experience. But the original scope of the game became this massive web that lost focus of the core story about a school board making decisions about the safety of its students and a nefarious force behind its push for censorship.

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