Behind The Screen | Bel Wang Serious Games Designer

Behind The Screen - Overview

Characterizing Goal

Behind The Screen is a game about understanding people's feelings, speaking up when something feels wrong, and being a good friend.

Elevator Pitch

You're the Dungeon Master for a group of long-time friends and have recently invited your friend’s partner to join your game, but they begin to show signs of being in an unhealthy controlling relationship.

Description

You must communicate with and listen to each of your players, being proactive when it comes to providing an enjoyable experience at the table and a supportive friend above the table.

While playing, you decide how the story you’re telling goes. Do you give your players a dungeon crawl or is it time for a shopping session? Do you let the player character die or do you fudge the dice roll?

As you play, you learn by observation what each player enjoys most and how to keep them engaged. These skills will come in handy when you have to make much more serious choices. Do you kick your friend out of the group? Do you tell them to break up?

No choice is clearly right or wrong, it’s nuanced and complex, but the choices that you make will impact how the story ends.

Behind The Screen - Project Info

Genre: Visual Novel
Engine: Godot Engine 4.4
Plugins: Dialogic 2
Team Size: 4
Duration: 3 weeks
Platforms: web, PC
Link: https://tchorne.itch.io/behind-the-screen
Developed as a final project for the Games For Social Good course at Carleton University

Behind The Screen - My Responsibilities

Game Design

Narrative Design

Game Writing

Worked with the lead game designer to design the game's mechanics and systems
Worked with the lead narrative designer to develop characters and establish key story points
Wrote the dialogue that wasn’t directly related to the D&D campaign (e.g. dialogue before/after/in between D&D sessions, moments where players break character during sessions)
Conducted playtests after week 2 and week 3 of development
Edited narrative and dialogue based on feedback from playtests

Behind The Screen - Game Design

The game premise, goals, and rules

As a DM for a group of friends, you must make decisions that provide a fun experience for your friends. There is no failure state for the game. If you empathize with the game's characters, your only goal is to make the decisions that will result in the people you care about being happy.

Mechanics

The game's only mechanic is selecting choices from a list of options given to the player during various events throughout the story. The 3 types of choices the player makes are:

Deciding how the events of the D&D campaign unfold
Deciding what to tell your friends regarding their actions
Deciding what direct actions to take to address a problem

Procedural Rhetoric

The overall philosophy we were aiming for was to not provide a set of options that are either 'right' or 'wrong'. As the subject is very complex and every situation is unique, we did not want to encourage or discourage a particular response (other than actively ignoring the issue, which either gets other characters upset with you or is not presented as an option at all). The intent was also not to encourage the players to try to get every ending and pick which one they like the most. Ideally, players will play the game once, reflect on the actions they took, acknowledge that taking action had a positive impact, and allow them to reflect (after they have finished the game) on whether or not those choices were the best ones they could have made. Our hope is that if players experience a similar situation later in life, they will at least put more thought into their choices and be more confident making these difficult decisions. This is represented in the gameplay in the following ways:

There are multiple 'endings', but none are 'good' or 'bad'.
There is no list of endings or branching path diagram that would encourage repeated playthroughs.
There is no ability to make a save at a branching point and load back to it later.

Cause Map Diagram / Root Cause Analysis

Scrapped system

We had brainstormed an 'interest' system for the game:

Each character would have an internal variable tracking their current interest level
A character's level of interest would be exposed through their body language and dialogue
For example, a character who is not interested might be looking at their phone or comment that something is boring
Choices you make would affect each character's interest level
As DM, you would have to learn how to keep each character interested
If characters are interested enough, they would request to speak to you one-on-one after sessions
This would give you an opportunity to learn more about their opinion on problems within the group

Ultimately, this system was scrapped since we felt that it wasn't necessary in order to tell the story that we wanted to tell with the game. We ended up scripting one-on-one talks with characters into the game so that most talks occur regardless of what decisions have been made. We felt that this was the right decision due to our short production timeframe (3 weeks) and because we had important plot points occur during these one-on-one talks that should not be missed.

Behind The Screen - Narrative Design

The story points listed below are left purposefully vague in order to avoid spoilers.
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Week 1

Introduction to half of the characters
Character creation and preparing to start D&D campaign
Tutorial for making choices
Low stakes, explicitly mentioning what effects choices have

Week 2

Introduction to the rest of the characters
Character creation and preparing to start D&D campaign
First major choice, emphasizing that actions have consequences

Week 3

Introduce D&D campaign
Make some choices within the campaign as DM
First major interpersonal conflict occurs

Intermission 1

Phone call between sessions to have a one-on-one talk with a character
Choices to be made as a friend

Week 4

Campaign continues
More choices to be made as DM
Another interpersonal conflict occurs
More choices to be made as a friend

Intermission 2

Emergency meeting between sessions
Major decision to be made as a friend and DM

Week 5

End of campaign
Consequences of previous actions will be felt

Epilogue

Wrapping up the story and looking into the future