Woebegone Woods
Woebegone Woods is a casual worker placement game with a focus on relationship building.
As narrative designer for this project, I designed systems around delivering a cozy, wholesome experience for the player. I did this by utilizing skills and character placement as a means to choose narrative storylets to play for the player based on things like tiers of character relationships and relationship growth from working together.
As lead writer, I have created memorable characters with meaningful stories that any player can connect to. Through careful consideration and long conversations with friends, I've been able to craft characters that are deeply personal. I also write dialogue between the characters to present the cozy experience while providing compelling character development and growth.
Through working on this project, I have learned greater narrative and systems design skills that can be applicable to any future project. I've also learned a great deal of teamwork and communication skills from creating these characters and working collaboratively with my team.
The player assigns characters of the Woebegone Woods to work at tasks in preparation for the upcoming Winter Festival. These tasks are building a bonfire, cooking a feast, and preparing a play performance. Reaching various thresholds of progress on these tasks will give the player a visual of that progress made. After a certain amount of days, the year will end and however much progress is made on all the tasks will be what is available for the festival. When characters are paired together, it is randomly decided whether they will have positive or negative relationship growth that day.
A combination of technical skills and relationship skills determines whether a positive or negative relationship growth occurs while at a task. Technical skills determine how well each character performs at a task, and the amount of progress they are likely to make toward that task. Relationship skills indicate how well any two characters work together. The more similar the relationship skills between paired characters, the more likely they are to have a positive relationship growth and make a larger amount of progress at a task. An additional character who does not directly contribute to task progress is present, named Bean. Bean is a stand-in for the player and instead provides buffs to skills when they are placed at a task where other characters are working, allowing for a higher chance of positive relationship growth and larger task progress. The positive vs. negative relationship growth is shown to the player via a dialogue selected from a pool of applicable dialogue. Additionally, special dialogue is available for when characters cross a threshold of positive relationship growth.
These special dialogues are larger in scope in that they show how the friendship of these characters grow and change over the course of three relationship tiers, and tell a full story across three instances of dialogue. Once the threshold is crossed, the next time the characters are paired together and Bean is placed with them, the corresponding dialogue overwrites all others that could play and is shown instead. And though it is possible for negative relationship growth, the stored value cannot decrease lower than the highest threshold already achieved. Although these dialogues show the negative side of relationships, the conflicts are resolved peacefully with only small arguments. All of this put together is to give the player a cozy feeling of making friends and facilitating the formation of other friendships, and showing both the good and bad sides of relationships, while building a community with everyone working toward a common goal of the Winter Festival.
The writing faced quite a few challenges especially with regards to quantity. There was confusion that arose from miscommunication and misinterpretation of what was documented, resulting in myself and other members of the team envisioning significant differences in the amount of dialogue that needed to be written. But after clarification, it became much easier to write dialogue that could be iterated on. But that doesn't mean there isn't still a large amount of dialogue. And because of that another problem arose where it was difficult to write unique situations for so many different combinations of characters and keeping them within the limitations provided by the design. Some of the dialogue does feel generic and some blend together, but overall the dialogue is distinct.