Exographer is primarily focused on its gameplay mechanics (see devlog #6), and its storyline emerged after all the design was essentially complete. Most of the text is used to solve puzzles, and it is revealed through the pages of a notebook to be decoded. To contextualize the information, each notebook entry is signed and dated by initially-mysterious characters...
In Exographer, the main character walks in the footsteps of nine academicians, rediscovering their discoveries and understanding why they disappeared. There are thus two stories: the one the character is living, and the one the academicians lived in the past. We've already covered this second storyline, based on the real history of science, in our devlog #4.
To visualize our character's typical journey through the academician world, as well as the flow of information the player receives, we used two interactive, non-linear storytelling tools. The first, Twine, is an open-source tool that lets you create such stories, like books in which you are the hero. A first version of our Exographer's story was conceived and proposed to the team by our narrative designer, Raphaël Granier de Cassagnac.
We soon realized that this wouldn't be enough. While most of the notebook's pages focus on puzzles and include local clues, nine special pages require you to search for clues all over the world. Both for the players and the team could be confused by this apparent complexity! To visualize this scattered information, we used a second piece of software, ArcWeave, which, in addition to preserving the possible routes for the player, enabled us to add illustrations, lists of objects (pages, clues, academics...) and link them together.
If our players had access to our ArcWeave, they could easily answer the questions some of them have when platinizing the game, for example on Steam:
- Where to find Rofur and Tosom's codes for the emulsive zone?
- Where are Rucie’s, Shgig’s and Dirca's final clues hidden?
But you better try to find them by yourself, it’s not that difficult.