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In space, no one can hear you bark
2021, interactive fiction
Made in collaboration with Alessia Ianni-Palarchio, Jason Guisao, & Sam Sorensen
my roles: design, narrative design, editing, UI/UX
tools used: Twine 2, Unity, Photoshop, Miro

In space, no one can hear you bark is the final project my team produced during a semester-long narrative design studio at New York University. The game is a Unity interface which presents the player with a branching, sci-fi narrative by referencing dialog stored in a couple dozen "bark sheet" style spreadsheets.

While everyone on the team touched the narrative in some way & contributed to the bark sheets, I was responsible for managing the overall structure of the game & ensuring consistent characterization for each one of our little space marines.

Lessons learned:

  • Very short chunks of loosely-related dialog presented a pretty interesting writing constraint. When we synthesized the pitch for this game, it seemed like a daunting challenge. Rather than trying to game design our way out of this, I encouraged the team to embrace the limited form & see what we could do.
  • Despite all being narrative designers, every member of the team brought a very different specialty to the table. Roughly speaking, we had a technical narrative designer, a structural designer, a script writer, & an editor. We all wrote about a fourth of the game's script, & were further able to contribute to the game.