Muse - Narration

We really wanted to make the player feel the nostalgia of the character who returns to his childhood village, this feeling of knowing a place that has lived without us but that we have always known.

We were really inspired by this feeling of nostalgia to create our character and our history but also this need to reconnect with your inner child to better advance as an adult.

Before starting to create our dialogues, we defined our different characters. We decided to draw inspiration from the nine Greek muses, linked with the artistic inspiration of our protagonist.

We ultimately selected five of them, in order to give them greater importance and depth within the limited development timeframe.

Of the five characters, three of them, the childhood friends, allowed us to define the three main paths of our protagonist's development. It is these characters who, depending on the player's choices, determine the game's ending.

Since Muse is a narrative game, we quickly moved towards a game based on choices through dialogue. Initially, we considered a complex structure which we then simplified.

Through this simplification, we worked with a branching tree structure, using a main framework and modular sections.
To generate our dialogues, we implemented a pipeline based on the Twine software.

Initially, we wrote our dialogues, outlining our intentions and the information we wanted to convey to the player.
Then, to make them more believable, we acted them out as if on stage and then tested them in Unreal Engine. We iterated as needed.

In our initial playtests, we realized the experience was relatively flat.
So we created an intensity curve to rebalance it.
Blue represents the player's physical intensity (inputs), and red represents the emotional intensity.

In the end, we developed two of the three main planned routes, judging that they were the most interesting and that making rich routes was better than making more.