It’s almost time to lace up your skates and do your best FLYING V! Time for your best knuckle pucks and triple dekes! QUACK QUACK QUACK QUACK, while I am still waiting for EA to pump out a Mighty Ducks Edition or DLC for NHL 24, they haven’t announced it yet, but they did announce some stuff today ahead of NHL 24’s release this October.
Deep Dive: Cultivating randomness in the peculiar branching narrative of Astronaut: The Best
15.08.2023 - 20:43 / gamedeveloper.com / Best
Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.
Earlier installments cover topics such as the player-centric approach helped Dead Cells evolve into a full IP, how the makers of Let's! Revolution! prototyped their way into a better Minesweeper, and why the developers of Thronefall are making strategy games for people who don't have time for the genre.
In this edition, indie developer Mike Sennott discusses in-depth his approach to branching and randomized narrative in the occult management adventure game Astronaut: The Best.
Hi there, my name is Mike Sennott, a long-time indie designer and writer with an academic background researching game narrative. My latest project is Astronaut: The Best, an occult management adventure game about running a proper space academy using lies, witchcraft, and/or hard work. As you can probably tell from my stab at an elevator pitch, it’s a pretty out-there game where we chanced exploring some new and unusual ludonarrative territory. For its release on August 15, 2023, I wanted to discuss one aspect of its design that I’d love to see future games borrow and expand upon: its combination of branching and randomized narrative.
Before diving into the narrative design, I should start by explaining Astronaut: The Best’s mechanics and goals. From the outset, our team wanted to create a leadership simulation. It can be tough to hold a position of public responsibility—getting conflicting direction from higher-ups, being held accountable for others’ failures, dealing with overzealous media—and we wanted to put the player in that difficult situation by embodying those conflicts and trade-offs. However, we didn’t want to make the experience feel too stressful or judgmental. Instead, our goal was to build a kind of moral laboratory, a lighthearted and humorous space where the player can try out different values and modes of behavior to discover the consequences.
Our specific scenario was vaguely inspired by the book The Right Stuff: How do you choose the right astronauts for a space program? So many factors go into that seemingly simple decision beyond just a cadet’s apparent skills—how they deal with stress, work with a team, or handle the media might be just as important.
To represent this scenario, we introduced some light strategy/management mechanics: the player trains cadets in various stats (piloting, procedure, fitness, charm, and beauty), which they can use to overcome different challenges. But ultimately, our moral laboratory is about making narrative decisions. Not just dealing
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Astronaut: The Best is a fun quirky occult management game about running a space academy
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