Cybertext 2020

Cybertext 2020 is an atmospheric short story in the form of a text adventure about running away from and towards danger.

My work: Programming, UI Design, Writing
Duration: April 2021 – September 2021, on average ca. 3h/week
University Project, done alone. Unity Engine.

Cybertext 2020 emerged as a successor to a game jam project that met my acute passion for Cyberpunk 2077 and quest design. In the context of a practical university course and beyond that, I started implementing a small quest engine and designing a text adventure around it.

Programming

The main feature on the coding side is a loosely coupled, lightweight questgraph module with the following aspects implemented:

  • a graph of event pools and sub-graphs
  • an event has several outcomes, depending on an input, and each outcome leads to an event pool
  • a signal traverses from pool to pool, and upon arriving at a pool randomly chooses an event, which is returned to be interpreted by the game logic
  • Class diagram of the quest module and its children in Cybertext 2020.
  • First sketch of the data structure underlying a quest.

UI Design

In order to stage the progression in the quest structure, I devised a set of UI assets and features:

  • the quest UI, which represents the state of the quest graph, contains bygone events and randomly provides glimpses at future ones, thus eliciting anticipation (see images 2-4 below)
  • overall creation of an aesthetic through the use of a sci-fi, cyberpunk color palette and uniformly designed symbols
  • intro animation inspired by Cyberpunk 2077’s marketing aesthetics
  • Collection of UI assets created for the game: quest nodes, node connecting lines, background assets, and the 4-frame intro.
  • The quest UI visualises the state of the quest and provides glimpses at future nodes.
  • Screenshot of the game’s start, with the text and choice wheel on the left and the quest UI on the right.
  • Screenshot later in the game, showing the scrollbar, multiple choices, and how the player chose one path over another in the past.

Inspirations

The following moodboard collects some of my inspirations.

Key Learnings

  • it was a key experience to have a vision in mind (a cyberpunk textadventure) and execute it such that I am content with the result
  • exploring new means of storytelling (UI, animation, visualised quest graph)
  • how there is a common graph-based base structure in many quest/dialog/scene systems