Deep Dive: Cultivating randomness in the peculiar branching narrative of Astronaut: The Best

gamedeveloper.com:

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