NeuroBoost Academy
A story-driven Visual Novel teaching studying techniques
Play Curious game created on behalf of the Polytech Foundation,
3-months internship (2022)
Narrative Designer, Game Designer
3-months internship (2022)
Narrative Designer, Game Designer
Game Pitch
This game aims to teach Metacognition, the science of learning, to college students. You play as the student of a futuristic Engineering Academy, who fails their exams, before being brought back in time by the 'Elders'. The 4 experts will teach you the best techniques for studying and balancing your life, that you will have to apply through your choices.
This project was a great first experience in the industry, allowing me to leverage my Narrative Design and Writing skills in a professional context.
Narrative Design
New Direction When I arrived at Play Curious, the game was in an advanced state but needed a full redesign of the story and gameplay. We brainstormed a lot with Jesse Himmelstein - Founder of the studio - to find a new direction that would allow for more freedom and story consistency.
Writing and Editing To fit the new direction, my job was to re-write 90% of the game's dialogues. Sometimes this included editing a phrase or two, but most of the time I had to write the scenes from scratch.
Handling the Branching Story Perhaps the most time-consuming task was to re-organize all the story branches using the Yarn Spinner tool, create new ones and make up for every possible outcome in the game.
Creating Fun Sequences Because of all the teaching elements, the story could, at times, feel somewhat bland. To solve this, I created a lot of interesting fun-based sequences, such as a party section with different activities, a dream sequence, an investigation scene, a scene based on persuasion, some references and easter-eggs, and much more.
Making the Prologue I built a Prologue with choices to fit the new direction and improve the game's onboarding.
Game Design
System Design One of the considerations of the rework was making the Economy System consistent. I had to come up with different functions for the the player's gauges, and different ways to influence them (for example, some gauges are now influenced by time, or by other gauges). I also designed the score system along those gauges.
Balancing To fit the new system, I had to do extensive balancing. I used Google Sheets to list all the player's choices and their impact on the gauges, and a simple algorythm to test the paths' outcomes.
Adding Features I came up with many additions for the game's features : the ability to see the time of deadlines and the time of each action, the short pauses in the text when it shows a punctuation, tutorial boxes and some other ones.
QA and Bug-Fixing I worked with the QA tester to fix a lot of major and minor bugs linked to the branching story and gauges.
Takeaways
I had a lot of freedom inside the studio to add my creative touch to the game, and the project made me focus on the story from the player's perspective. This was very important since this was a commercial game that had to engage the target audience. Overall, this first completely narrative-oriented game sharpened my skills in Narrative Design and Creative Writing.
A sneak peek at my work environment !
The NeuroBoost Team
