The Game
The Tale of Okuninushi is a text adventure based upon the Japanese myth of Okuninushi. Initially made for a Storycrafting for Games course at the University of Utah in Fall 2020, this game sends you to ancient Japan where you do things like find true love, fight gods and family to keep that love, help innocents and so much more!
My Responsibilities
Research
Based upon the Japanese tale of Okuninushi, I developed this game's story through heavy research. This involved looking through many different videos, essays, reading different versions of the story, and so much more. Essentially I was learning more about how the story was made and understanding the main themes to properly adapt it to text format with multiple pathways.
Narrative Design
As the sole writer/developer of this project, my goal was to create a faithful yet also interesting and fun story with pathways for players to follow and see new sides of this tale. This involved writing out each individual pathway, adding new interesting elements to each section of the story, adding dialogue and more scenes, and utilizing feedback to program every part of this story, both original and new into the game through Twine.
Art/Design
After I finished the initial project and submitted it as a fun playable text adventure, I knew there could be more done with it. Wanting to continue the game through Unity, I began designing various art through Adobe Photoshop, creating the game's logo, pages, and borders to transform the initial game to be more visually appealing. While this is still a work in progress, I have made strong efforts to keep the game going.
Challenges
Writing The Tale of Okuninushi was a fascinating opportunity to write my first full text adventure. The real challenge I found in making a game like this was in terms of adding to the original story. There's a reason why this myth has been told for generations and to add to it felt initially off, as if I was rewriting history. But as I proceeded to look at the game through it's characters, especially when it comes to how our protagonist moves throughout, I saw an opportunity to see how things could have been different and was able to add to the story in a way that felt authentic without changing much to the original fable.