Project Overview

Lily Biundo and I collaborated on this dark interactive narrative as a result of an exploration of the text-based game in an interactive narrative course at UCSC. We had both previously met through a shared friend. Splitting the programming and writing tasks, we made great time plotting out our story map and dividing the work. Learning the Inform 7's engine grammar was fairly straightforward, and it proved itself to be an excellent tool for prototyping storylines, whether linear or branching.

In the wake of Telltale's Tales series making headlines, I looked to many of the then-new narratives to derive ideas and points of design to deliver the promising stories I wanted to tell. The premise Lily and I agreed upon was a sci-fi story with a protagonist stuck in a drifting ship in deep space, with the dilemma of figuring out which of the NPCs is the player's friend. It's an inner dialogue about morality, choosing friends, and putting the pieces of a mystery together.

Design and Development

One of the larger hurdles of development came from players having difficulty visualizing the map. Thankfully, Inform 7 allows for the display of images with a text entry. We utilized this feature to map out the ship for the player. We gladly adopted several out-of-the-box mechanics to allow Derelict to breathe; moving over to an alternate navigation scheme (fore, aft, port, starboard) was one of my favorite changes to the standard system of using cardinal compass directions for navigation.

We opted for a linear story experience. Without the potential of a branching narrative, we decided to build a hidden story for players to discover through the unlocking of archived logs, environmental details, a complex ship AI's secrets, and the mysterious disappearance of the ship's crew. Using an extension's quip-based and reactable quip functionality, we were able to provide multiple dialogue choices with a simple interface players can use to gather information about the world to progress.

The scope of the project sounded large at first. However, the tools we had access to granted us an insane amount of robust utility and power to create the perfect narrative.

Feel free to play Derelict in your browser or download it above!