Emotional Parity: Best Practices In RPG’S
This thesis project is the dissection and implementation of narrative components in a game space to identify effective design techniques to evoke emotional parity for immersive narrative shorthand. The resulting artifact is a Fallout 4 quest that demonstrates aspects of identified elements that are refined through the results of volunteer testing.
Role
Narrative & Level Designer
Game Engine
Fallout 4 Creation Kit
Platform
PC
Development Time
7 Months, 2019
Team Size
1 Designer
Emotional Parity Playthrough
Screenshots
Slide Deck and Thesis Defense Presentation
Post Mortem
What Went Well ?
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Research - Early research about parity, murder mysteries, and criminal interrogations helped to narrow the focus of the project down.
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Dialogue - 1,100+ lines of dialogue helped to create robust interactions between the player and non-player characters.
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Barks - Generic bark dialogue is important to creating lore for the world and filling in gaps in knowledge about the player character.
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Motivational Parity - Creating moments of motivational parity is more straightforward to design for and necessary to the player experience.
What Went Wrong ?
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Dialogue - 1,100 individual lines of dialogue is difficult to manage and iterate on effectively.
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Emotional Parity - Elements that were discovered to create emotional parity are definable, but not always effective for every player.
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Conveyance - Initially it was concepted that there would be fewer utilized HUD elements, but that left players feeling lost and confused until one was implemented.
What I Learned ?
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Definable elements for emotional parity through small goals, environmental interactions, social interactions, and player choice.
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How to continue this thesis through focused NPC interactions and limiting the scenes and dialogue interactions.
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Value barks as ways to convey narrative and give players emotional connections to the world.
