Deep Dive: Using Exoscript to tame the "Narrative Octopus" of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

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, Sarah Northway, co-founder of Northway Games and creator of I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, walks us through the tools and techniques used to implement the game's unique simultaneous storytelling system. 

My favorite narratives are ones where the reader – or player – is a participant, taking the author’s text and telling their own stories with it. For our narrative RPG, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, I wanted this: organic worldbuilding, characters with their own lives, replayability, and major events as signposts in a larger narrative space the player can explore. Not a linear visual novel, but a loose and vast narrative intertwined with deckbuilding and stats raising, dynamic yet deterministic.

I’m Sarah Northway, co-founder of Northway Games and creator of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, as well as the narrative city-building series Rebuild and other games. I grew up an avid reader and writer before games became my life. I even considered writing a young-adult sci-fi novel instead of this game, but I know my strengths lie in programming and game design, and it would be a waste not to combine them with the story I wanted