The Nine Tales

Meet the Coconut Dogs!

The Development

Before production had begun, I was tasked with designing and creating the player controller for the project. We initially had decided on some basic concepts regarding an atmospheric storytelling game similar to the likes of Ori and the Blind Forest or Hollow Knight. Each member of our team was tasked with creating a game pitch with the above concepts in mind (mine was not chosen, but if you’re interested) which settled us on the concept of the Chinese Huli jing (狐狸精) ‘Fox Spirit’ which opened many interesting design avenues to explore. The idea was to retain the ambivalent and observing nature of the original mythos of the Fox, similar to western mythology’s Unicorn.

The production began on the game, but our team ran into some issues when deciding on specific details regarding the specifics of what the game was aiming to show, so I developed a new game pitch which ended up with The Nine Tales as we know it now! In large part because of this direction the game had turned, my role on the team changed from player controller programmer to Narrative Designer and Creative Lead. With a more objective view of the goals for our game, we embarked on creating The Nine Tales as described in the aforementioned pitch.

A large part of the early development process was deciding on how to incorporate the 9 stages of grief framework into every level. The idea was that each chapter would reflect its corresponding stage of grief, however, we found it difficult to come up with ludo-narratively resonant gameplay mechanics to populate the game. The narrative structure relied heavily on what actions the player would or could take. This was outlined in the Story Circle I developed for the plot line of the game (seen below).

Now that the story had been laid out, my job was to write out the dialogue for the narrative sections of gameplay. All the scripts were compiled into a Dialogue Document which could be used to transition the scripts from the cloud into the game. These files eventually turned into Twine Scripts for both testing and implementation into Unity later on. I had to really analyze the characters I’d created in order to develop personalities and ways to write each one to make them appear unique. I accomplished this by writing characters with unique text styles, like the Celestial Spirit speaking in riddles with ellipses wrapping the text. Another challenge I had to face was writing dialogue prompts for decisions that would change the course of the narrative. Ensuring that the player understood and was able to make the correct decision with the information provided was integral to creating a resonant experience. Shortly into my writing process, I found that it may be useful to note the tone the character was speaking in to avoid confusion or misinterpretation. Clarity throughout all aspects of this development was extremely important in order to ensure the player could engage with the narrative how we wanted them to. Implementation into Fungus, a Unity plugin was simple after all the documentation I had developed, and it resulted in a compelling and engaging story that dives deep into the emotions we were looking to convey!

I took some additional time to write external scenes using games’ characters. This was in order to shape the emotional flow of the story and really sit with each character in a personal way. Here is an example of this scene writing:

Programs:
Unity, Fungus (Plugin), Excel, Google Suite, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop, JIRA, Confluence, Trello

Overview

The Nine Tales is a Visual Novel Platforming game that follows a young Nine-Tailed Fox who must understand human mortality in order to achieve enlightenment & immortality. The story is presented through 9 chapters, or “Tales”, whose themes and characters are all meant to reflect and tackle one of the Nine Stages of Grief (see below). Completing each chapter of the game will reward the Fox with an additional tail, which unlocks more abilities used to decipher the increasingly intricate emotions characters display. The player has an active role in these decisions, as The Nine Tales requires the player to really think through these abstract concepts in order to reach the best outcome! The Nine Tales is meant to be a thought-provoking yet still relaxing and simple game that focuses primarily on its story over any mastery over gameplay mechanics. There are platforming sections interspersed between narrative gameplay that act as a reprieve from the at-times very intense emotional scenes the game delves into. This project was developed alongside members of my 4th-year capstone group called Coconut Dog for Sheridan College’s Honours Bachelor of Game Design Program.

My Role

I acted as both a Narrative Designer and Writer during this project. I was tasked with writing the overarching narrative of the game including plotting out all story & gameplay beats, all in-game dialogue, and providing details and resources for other teams to develop the assets necessary for the games’ completion. Additionally, I developed design documents and presentations (see The Nine Tales Design Video) that were shown to industry professionals for feedback throughout the development period.

One of my philosophies when it comes to development stagnation is simply to make something that just works. I feel that it’s better to have something that fits but isn’t pretty than to have nothing at all. So, in this case, I got to work designing the Overarching Narrative document for the team. The goal of which was to write a document that could be referenced for all members of the team when concerning narrative implementation. This document slowly expanded further into designing the entire flow of the game, including gameplay beats, NPC designs, narrative decisions & their repercussions, and the occasional technical detail. However, onboarding team members to an (at the time) 37-page document was not a simple task, so I also created a narrative onboarding document as a more digestible introduction to the story. Furthermore, I spoke with the different members of the team to ask if any additional information should be added for quick reference at the top of each “scene” which translated into the small graphs and color-coding found throughout the document. This in tandem with the Overarching Narrative document became the core document referred to when discussing all future design decisions.

Later into development, the team realized that scope would be a major issue with respect to the time limitations we have on the project. We had originally intended to have 9 complete levels that tell one cohesive story throughout, with varying levels and moods accompanying them. However, this dream was not in the cards for this particular development, thus we had to decide how to proceed. We eventually decided that we would focus all of our efforts on the first level of the game in order to have a polished and complete game. This left the narrative hanging in a very awkward spot, as originally the first level was meant mostly as an introduction to key characters whose plot lines would resolve later in the story. In response to this drastic shift, I had to redevelop an Overarching Narrative for Level 1 document to tie up those loose ends.