PERMUTATION seeks to explore how altering modality can affect one’s perception of narrative, and how that unique experience can affect a player’s relationship to identity within a story. It is not always possible to create for every sense and be perfectly multimodal in every situation, but if media and technology were designed for many different senses in varying combinations, then there would be a library of experiences and technologies that could provide something for everyone. With this idea in mind, I wanted to take the classic interactive and narrative elements of a video game and twist them. In my exploration of modality and narrative design in PERMUTATION, I decided to include visuals, but the interaction, the narrative, plot, would primarily exist in a world of sound. I wanted to include visuals in this iteration as I think I can create a powerful relationship between the player’s own influence on the game through choices made in audioscapes and their resulting visual changes.

Creating a narrative that bounces back and forth between different styles of delivery is tricky to share outside of the finished product, but I will endeavor to walk us through the process I underwent to create it. 

I began in Twine, a game-design platform specifically created for branching narratives. Here, I wrote the entire story in the same format. This allowed me to create the story without confusing things between different mediums and modalities.

The script still needed to be fully written in detail, and the consequences for the visual aspect of the game needed to be mapped, so I created another narrative map, this one with labels that specifically indicated the transitions between modalities. This map existed alongside the written dialogue script, and together they created the structural clarity necessary to begin making this game. They are still complex, as the narrative structure itself is complex, but it allowed me to follow it easily, so I could get to creating my game in Unity, where the finished project would be accessible to players other than myself.

I then mapped this our into Unity scenes, so that I could keep track of the complex storyline while building my game. This map gives you the complete scope of the story.