Final project for CRWR 310 – Narrative Game Design developed across the school term, including a narrative vision slide deck and narrative design document. The vision deck was presented to groups for workshopping, with feedback employed in making the final design document.
Ashen Wall is a concept I came up with in high school, revolving around a small ragtag group within a dystopian, walled-off city swarming with drones, controlled by a massive corporation. This course to me was an opportunity to flesh out this idea and take it to a higher level- Though admittedly a lot changed in the process. The criteria of the assignment dictated that the game could not involve any combat whatsoever. As such, I decided to base the core gameplay loop around a shield- A defensive tool, rather than an offensive one. This lead to the title itself, Ashen Wall both referring to the massive, ash-enshrouded wall overlooking the city, as well as the main character Mona herself, who acted as a wall with her shield.
The aesthetic of a city covered in ash was the strong driver of the game’s narrative thought-line. I wanted the player to feel immersed in this cold, isolating environment, reflecting the views of the protagonist. The protagonist herself always had a monochrome colour-scheme in my concept, but then the thought struck me: What if the whole world was monochrome? What if this is how she saw the world? One idea lead to another, and I now had a tighter idea of how the story’s visual and gameplay narrative would tie together, with colour gradually returning to Mona’s world quite literally in how the game visuals changed.
The design document itself required several components. I established the core player fantasy, tone, world, and characters, while also more mechanically addressing the game intro cutscene, in-game dialogue with triggers, barks for the final boss, and samples of found narrative elements. Of these items, my favourite sections to work on were the intro and found narrative.
I’ve always had a particular focus on visuals when it comes to writing. That’s why I also enjoy writing for screenplay and comic books, both being very reliant on having a good visual direction. Creating the intro script was much like writing a screenplay, and I did my best to play into that dystopian tone I wanted to achieve, putting the player right into the view of the massive, overwhelming city and its walls, already seeing the world in only black and white. The scope narrows towards a street level where Mona enters the scene, but not without already gaining hints of the isolated nature of the city through environmental details, giving you an idea of how the protagonist feels before even being able to take control.
The found narrative I chose to use were two different journal logs from an NPC known as Aquila, who was a robot (though this detail is hidden to the player for most of the story). The first one details his first ever log, depicting the thought processes of an emotionless robot who has been instructed to keep a journal but does not understand the logic. The second log is his most recent entry in the present day, where he reflects on the event where he first met Mona. This log comes off with a completely different energy, with enthusiasm in the words that reflects the personality the player is familiar with. All this is to show how Aquila changed and developed in the time between his first and last log, of a robot slowly becoming more human. The idea behind this choice of found narrative was to further emphasize the running theme of finding “colour” in a monotonous life, the goal that Mona must achieve by the end of the story.