tell me a story(board)

Once we had a rough idea of the themes and tensions that would power the gameplay, we put together a diagram of how a sample round of “Eyre” might be put together. Game phases are color coded by the kind of activity that would take place in that round. Emphasis here was placed on gauging the storytelling rythm of a round. We also tried to put some stakes in the ground re how long a round needed to be to feel satisfying but graspable (a tricky balance -- we may not have hit that balance quite yet).

Note the “cinematic recap” at the end. Marc (being the writer nerd) felt like watching a thirty second replay of all the decisions in the game, zipping along like a cartoon on steroids, would make the experience feel more like writing your own Jane Austen novel… Somehow… Now whether this is intuitively brilliant is up for debate, but it’s probably all wrong in terms of capping the player experience in a satisfying way. It’s probably the wrong gesture. He’s already abandoned this dicy stand and the next generation of storyboards dropped the recap. 
​
You can also see how the stand-in labels are already starting to show some of the game’s evolving “personality.”