Deep Dive: Narrative mapping and simultaneous storytelling in Wayward Strand

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 technical design of impossible spaces in the M.C. Escher-inspired game Mind Palace, the transition from digital illustration to indie development with comic book writer and artist Meredith Gran of Perfect Tides, and designing and implementing controls for the mobile port of PC and console title Descenders.

In this edition, Jason Bakker, a writer on Wayward Strand, discusses the game's narrative conceit and how the team designed around, and for, the challenges of simultaneous storytelling.

Hi, I’m Jason Bakker, a member of the team making Wayward Strand, a heartfelt narrative game set on an airborne hospital, in which you play as Casey, a teenage girl exploring the hospital and getting to know the patients and staff on board.

Inspired by interactive theater productions like Sleep No More, and classic adventure games like The Last Express, in Wayward Strand we tell multiple, simultaneous stories that overlap with each other across the course of three in-game days.

For Wayward Strand, I contributed to several elements, including writing, narrative design, game design, and programming--each of these alongside other team members. I’ll go into some of the unique tools we’ve built to enable this mode of storytelling, as well as how it’s affected our design processes and what the outcomes have been.

When our indie team, based in Melbourne Australia, set out to make Wayward Strand in 2016, we knew that this style of storytelling had been