The AI Story (Academic Project):

The AI Story is a 2D narrative driven side-scroller. This game was developed by a group of 4 people using Unity. While this project was technically created for a college class, the class is formatted to emphasize the project as entirely student work, from initial concept to a completed game. In The AI Story, the player will be controlling a programmer who has developed their own artificial intelligence (AI) at their job. The game will simulate the passing of time by giving the player the opportunity to talk with their AI on a schedule similar to a work week. Each typical day will involve the programmer talking with their AI, before playing a mini-game under the AI’s witness. Within each passing day, the AI will behave differently, giving the programmer more encouragement until it goes totally crazy. Once the player notices the negative trajectory of the AI, they will gather information about the AI through a design document or a Twitter account, which will help them decide whether to save the AI or destroy it.

My contributions to this project involve working on the design of the game’s mechanics and narrative, with a large emphasis towards the latter. I designed the functionality of the daily chat, as well as a Twitter account for the AI. I wrote the dialogue in the game and incorporated it into the Unity scene using the Ink tool. The narrative for the AI was designed for it to start with a cold personality, before gradually becoming warmer then causing an overload. A real Twitter account was created and contains information about how to progress in the game, being designed specifically to make the player look through real information, essentially breaking the fourth wall. The fake design document includes similar information to the Twitter account, giving the player a password needed to advance in the game, thus further enhancing the idea that the game breaks the fourth wall by design.

While this project was not my first time working as a narrative designer, this project was my first time using the Ink software to incorporate dialogue into a Unity scene, allowing me to iterate the dialogue I wrote in the game itself. This was also the first time I took on a solo narrative designer role, which meant I had to get creative with what I wanted to narrative to be like. I needed to perform research on the type of personality the lead game designer wanted me to incorporate, as well as teach myself how to use the Ink tool and include the dialogue into the Unity scenes, in order to meet the approval of our team’s main game designer.