What's better than an epic fable with heroes triumphant over evil? Profiting off those adventures is what! In the land of Woodley Hollow, any time there is a damsel in distress or a prince in peril, the story’s rights are sold to the Bardic Guild of Entertainment. Those lyricists and lobbyists then turn to Adventuring Agencies to cast the right Heroes to resolve the adventure in the most epic proportion possible. As an Adventure Agency, there are a lot of things to consider. What’s hot right now? Who’s popular but not too popular? Success or failure, so long as it’s something the bards can sing about someone in Woodley Hollow will find a way to make gold off of it.
Role: Game Design, Game Development, Narrative Design |Project: Vertical slice prototype |Platform: PC |Engine: Unreal Engine 5.3
Itch Page for Prototype: https://adventuresincgame.itch.io/adventures-inc
Make it Cozy. Make it Funny
Over the last four years, there has been a growing demand for cozy games with simpler mechanics, conversational encounters with intriguing characters and rich narratives driven by player choice.
Set in a fantasy kingdom, Adventures Inc. is a punchy satire of the Hollywood culture of reaching fame at all costs. I wanted a game that was simple, fun and a little bit of a scathing commentary on the Hollywood machine.
System Foundation
We started working with the idea of an “interview for an adventure”, which grew into an idea where the main character ran a talent agency, and the interviews could be like auditions. Thus, the Hollywood satire was born. Focusing on the “interview” section as our core gameplay we started planning out the typical loop that players would experience.
I worked on how the heroes (the NPC’s the player interviews) would function in the back end and the numbering they would need to have in order to be counted toward a successful hiring. I knew we wanted the player to ask heroes questions, cross reference their resume, and try to determine who was the best candidate. Here’s where I started running into some issues. I worked to try and figure out the numerical value that heroes would need to have a “successful” outcome for an adventure.
I tried numbering out “classes”, I tried trying to associate colors with abilities, I even tried laying it out with pieces from other board games. The numbers were getting confusing, convoluted and just weren’t working
Problem, meet solution.
Rather than focusing on the numbers to determine a successful adventure, I thought it might work better to focus on the narrative determination instead. Bypassing a complex numbering system, I started building a system that focuses on the heroes as individual characters instead of classes and simplifying everything into only three outcomes. The trick to this was creating specific “roles” within an adventure rather than looking at the adventure as a whole. Now a Hero could be good at one role, okay at another, and bad at the last. Six heroes, everything easily divided by three:
Each Hero that is interviewed is predetermined to have a narrative outcome that aligns with their easy-to-follow numerical output in the backend. With this, players get a full narrative experience without needing to worry about their choices being the “wrong one”. I wanted to lean into the casual nature of the game so that players only need to worry about losing if they select the worst possible outcome for all three heroes. And honestly, at that point you deserve to lose.
Wireframed design and built out a comprehensive tutorial. Lots of time spent communicating concepts so that everything was built into the prototype.
Development
Wrote the dialogue for all the characters and facilitated a recording session with voice actors. Also, did some of the voice acting myself.
Developed a minigame and built it in Unreal Engine 5.3. Designed a small combat system with a basic scoring mechanic and integrated it into the build.
What do you do when your artist leaves?
You learn to draw!
We had an artist to help out with the original character designs for our cast. Unfortunately, they got pulled into another project and couldn’t commit the time to Adventures Inc anymore. At this point we still needed about 50 plus pieces of unique art. So, I bought myself a tablet, watched some videos on digital art, and got to work. It was a lot of learning but by the end of our development timeline I was able to put together all the art we needed.
