Unfolding is a procedural narrative toy about meeting someone new in an unfortunate time, inspired by our own emotions and struggles from living in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Unfolding, you are the writer of a short story of two people meeting during an unfortunate time. The game consists of gameplay that is designed around procedural techniques that are commonly used for narrative and/or writing. With that gameplay, we hoped to create a sense of creativity and feeling like you are writing a story rather than playing an actor in one.
I created Unfolding together with Marlene Delrive as part of our Master’s thesis at the IT University of Copenhagen, where we explored procedural narrative and the idea of evoking a sense of co-authorship between the player and the game My role was to implement the systems and authoring tools while Marlene did all the writing and visual design. We collaborated on the game design.
Some of my responsibilities included:
Implemented our own interpreter for Tracery grammars to which we then added additional language features to.
Implemented 2 authoring tools for writing the Tracery-like grammars in.
Implement a storylet selection system using a planner.
Unfolding can be played on Itch.
