Scuttlebutt Radio
About
Scuttlebutt Radio is a point and click narrative game made for Games Transfored - a leftwing game jam that was part of The World Transformed Festival.
The game follows a pirate radio station in a world in which climate collapse has led to 90% of the world being underwater. The player has to help the Scuttlebutt survive an attack from one of the few remaining land nations left. The game was made over a handful of days in the GameMaker Studio engine.
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Role
For this project I was the principle game designer and writer. This process involved coming up with the main gameplay elements of the game, leading on the scope of the project for the limited time we had for the jam, and doing the writing, worldbuilding, and narrative design for the majority of the project.
To do this I produced design documentation to hand over to our programmer, and then iterated on their various builds over the time that we had. We made heavy use of Miro as a workshopping/storyboarding/ideas generating platform in the development of this game.
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In particular I wanted to design gameplay elements that matched the game's theme of being set on a pirate radio station. For this reason we gave the player the ability to choose what to play on the radio station, which would give unique perks/power ups during your playthrough.
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Inspirations
This game was inspired by lots of different games from across genres. Our biggest inspiration was the game Citizen Sleeper, for both its themes, as well as its mechanics of having the player make difficult decisions, with limited resources, and under strict time pressures.
Alongside Citizen Sleeper other inspirations included narrative heavy point and click games like the Monkey Island games, which heavily inspired the aesthetics, and Disco Elysium, for the kind of left-wing, driven by captivating and interesting text style which we tried to emulate.