In Prom Week players had to navigate the cutthroat world of high school politics to land a date for prom.
This was an Expressive Intelligence Studio project at UCSC that had a sophisticated mind-model for NPCs, letting them pay attention to the social relationships between other characters. Game Play involved using those mind maps to your own advantage. For example, if you wanted to ask someone out but they didn’t like you, you could raise their opinion of you by getting close to their friends who were more neutral about you. Actions would ripple outwards through the network, resulting in wildly unexpected consequences.
The game had a huge amount of procedural dialogue templates that needed to be written to cover the myriad possible outcomes of player’s decision to act. It was an interesting challenge trying to keep character voices coming through despite writing dialogue that would get parsed and reformed procedurally during play.
Role: Dialogue Writer
