It's 1992. As a newly-hired editor in chief for New York's—quickly on the decline paper—The Local Rag, you are the paper's last hope of reclaiming success. By listening to tapes of interviews of Robert’s family, friends, and associates, observe writers notes to decide how Robert’s life and death will be portrayed in the headline article of tomorrow’s newspaper.
My Role
I am the technical game designer for this mixed media project! I was brought onto The Local Rag team in September 2022 and will continue to be a part of it until the game is fully released Summer 2024!
Designing & Implementing Features
Since this is a narrative, choice-based game, I work alongside the narrative designers and visual artists to add new features throughout the game's development.
The Granularity System
This system not only customizes the newspaper based on the player's choices, revealing the impact your report had on the people involved in the event. This system has three tones that change depending on the story: Muckraker, Status Quo, and Tabloid. All of the choices in this story fall into one of these categories. If you choose enough choices in one category, your paper will reflect that category's tone along with the article's wording.
Here are three pictures showing the first paragraph of each tone:
Muckraker, Status Quo, and Tabloid articles (in order)
Design
Since our game is based on the Apple II we had to refer to it as we used player feedback to refine the game’s features. This meant reviewing the UI artist’s sketches and prototypes and also making screens and buttons for players to interact with.
For example, I worked on the Settings Menu. I made a mockup of it in Figma for the UI artist to review. When she gave me the green light, I implemented it in the game with temporary assets so that the menu could still work and while the official art was being made.
Early Figma mockup of the menu
Settings Menu w/ regular font
Settings Menu w/ dyslexic-friendly font
When I'm not working on our granularity system, I'm implementing audio players for the interviews. The audio players allow the players to play, restart, pause, and scrub through the interviews so the player can listen and review information at their own pace.
These features widen our audience so people who are dyslexic and/or deaf or hard of hearing can play the game without any issues.
What about the mixed media part?
We've been working on it throughout the game's development! Since the game's beginning there have been two versions of it: the digital version and the hybrid version.
The digital version has all of the game's features on a computer. The hybrid version has everything except for a digitalized version of the audio and the memo. The player would use cassette tapes and a cassette player to listen to the tapes and the memo would be printed out, giving them a taste of journalism in the 90s.
Images
Before (Early Stages of Development)
Concept of the File Manager layout
Concept of the Fill-In panel layout
POC version of the File Manager
GIF of early gameplay
POC Version of the Fill-In panel
After (Current Version)
An example of an interview panel in the game
Current Gameplay GIF
Videos
Why are there two videos?
Since this game has a heavy audio experience, the gameplay loop is longer than my other projects. On average, it may take the player between 4-6 minutes to finish one character (2-3 minutes for the audio + 1-2 minutes for filling in the character panel). With five characters per story, it would take about 20-30 minutes to complete a story.
These videos provide a taste of the gameplay by providing a taste of a character's audio, filling in character drop downs, and printing an article.
An example of the interview files and audio
Character Fill-In and Article Output Video
Thank you for viewing!