YOU'RE NOT YORAK!
PROJECT SUMMARY
You're not Yorak! is an adventure narrative game created with designer/writer Kilian Johnson. Play as "Yorak", a human pretending to be an alien who was pretending to be a human. Try to escape the alien ship and maybe save the Earth along the way. This game started as an interactive story created using Twine in 2018. In 2020 we decided to pick the project back up again and move it into Unity to expand it into a full visual novel. We moved the project from twine to yarn in order to utilize Yarn Spinner. Yorak is one of my favourite projects as I have had the opportunity to receive feedback from popular narrative designers in the industry through the Capy Mentorship Programme. A balance of satire and comedy makes this a truly delightful game that will only get better as production progresses.
MY ROLE
This project allowed me to take on a larger role in the development. During the 1st iteration of the game, I focused most of my efforts on the writing and narrative design of the Twine project. I created 1 of the 3 main branches on my own and collaborated with Kilian on another branch. When we picked the project up again in June of 2020 I was highly invested in bringing the game into Unity and spent most of my time integrating YarnSpinner and Ropework. Once we started to move the project into unity I spent most of my time on programming to produce successful builds for playtesting and for review from other narrative designers. As the scope of the project increased I realized that it required more organization and time management. At this point in the project, I also took on the role of producer/project manager and began to use Trello to organize our tasks and set deadlines.
EXAMPLE WORK: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
Using Yarn as a visualization tool we were able to keep track of the overall story structure and how long each main branch of the story would run. The visualization also helped identify dead ends and make sure that each passage of the story was linked correctly and that there was no way for a player to get stranded at a specific node. This visualization also helps to show the different structures within the branches and the diversity in gameplay that can be found.
EXAMPLE WORK: PASSAGES & VARIABLES
My solo branch splits and merges multiple times and this can make it look like there are very few possible ending in my branch. Within the actual passages, several variables are being tracked that change what text shows up at these merge points. The image above shows the end node of my route and displays the different texts available based on how much suspicion the player drew to themselves.
EXAMPLE WORK: TRELLO BOARD
The Trello board helped to make a comprehensive list of tasks that needed to be completed. Once we created a list of tasks I then assigned the tasks according to our individual capabilities and time constraints. Unassigned tasks are tasks that both of us are responsible for and work to contribute towards. Having the completed section is also great for keeping motivation up as it gets longer as the project progresses.