Entropius Design History

Narrative Designer, Writer, Game Designer UI Designer
Entropius is a visual novel role-playing game with dialogue and narrative choices that impact the game's ending. To do this, we wanted to encourage players to make decisions based on their own desires rather than what they expected to result in a better outcome.

To do this, our game revolved around an "Esteem"-system, an invisible system that tracks players decisions to see what characters and Houses they most align with over the course of the game.

Proposal Document

We started development by creating a basic dialogue system with dialogue choices.

Early on, we began integrating dialogue into the initial game builds. The script and game were developed simultaneously, meaning that integrations and ideations were quickly integrated into each build.

As we continued development, we began to also integrate backgrounds and art into each build.

With the dialogue manager built, we began to develop a combat system as well. This combat system was designed to reflect the investigative aspects of the game's narrative, with options to "Investigate" to see when the enemy will have a "Strong Attack" - an attack more powerful than traditional attacks.

Though the game's player-character is more defined, we decided to allow player's to choose the name of the player character to enable role-play. This helped encourage player's to make decisions based on their own beliefs.

More dialogue and characters were integrated to help player's visualize the game narrative.

The combat system UI was updated to better fit into the game's visual style.

An "Excursion Break" system was integrated into the game. These were placed at natural breaks in the narrative and contained unique and personal conversations with House Leaders and Love Interests. Players could also choose to perform combat.

Conversations in Excursion Breaks included conversation choices that would strengthen or weaken the player's relationship with each character and house.

The combat system UI was once again updated.

Conversation Choice UI was also updated to be visually coherent with the rest of the game.

Entropius was released with a full novelette-length script, combat system, and 10 ending variations based on player's choices through the game.
In addition to narrative and game design, I also made an original soundtrack. The game is available on itch.io.