Poucet
A Procedural Interactive Fiction
A personal project,
Created during my 3rd year at Rubika,
In which I handled all aspects of creation,
During a 4 months period in 2023 - in parallel with school projects.
Created during my 3rd year at Rubika,
In which I handled all aspects of creation,
During a 4 months period in 2023 - in parallel with school projects.
Game Pitch
You play as one of the Poucet brothers, in reference to the French Fairy Tale, lost in a mysterious forest. As you progress through the woods, you'll randomly encounter characters from famous bedtime stories. Will you survive the Faustian Forest, or better yet, lift its ancient curse?
This narrative project was my first try at Solo Game Dev. I created a prototype to serve my vision and make it evolve.
Game Design
Creative Vision I first defined my vision through references like Road96, European Fairy Tales and Inkle games, and my own experience guidelines.
Design To reach the desired experience, I designed the features incrementally, based on the core mechanic of talking to random NPCs from a roaster.
Playtesting One of the driving forces of the project was sharing my ideas and prototype to others and gathering feedback. I think the most valuable thing for a designer is to know when to ask for external opinions.
Narration
Procedural Narration The game's main focus was to create unique stories by shuffling the order of encounters, as in Road96. I had to make sure characters could react to whom the player already crossed path with at any time, without creating any loopholes.
Characters Roster I designed a set of flamboyant characters based on fairy tales, with flaws, assets and beliefs. The most important thing was how they related to eachother based on their background and opinions.
Branching Dialogue The most exciting thing was to see all these characters take life by breathing dialogue into them, and crafting meaningful interactions with the player.
Prototyping
First Draft with Ink Inkle's editor allowed me to test the storyline and game flow quickly before implementing through the engine.
Development I programmed the game using Ink and Unity and created simple graphics inspired by Reigns. The result is basic enough to test the desired experience and mood without requiring any budget but my own time.
Iterative Process I started with the most basic structure and incrementally added and tweaked features to support the core experience : I experimented with usable items, stats, a map, an encyclopedia...
Screenshots from the Prototype
