Sidetracked

A narrative game created in virtual reality.

Sidetracked is a VR narrative game where you are a train conductor in a realm of lost souls. These lost souls will board the train and engage in conversation with the player. The player can influence the emotions of the soul through their interactions and change the outcome of the story. In the end, the way that the player responds to the lost soul will either help bring peace to their mind or send them further into the depths of the Limbo.

Development

This game was created during the first semester of my senior year at Champlain College.

Our team for Sidetracked included several individuals, myself included, that had worked on Nomad. We had decided that since we worked very well together then, we want to keep some of the team together to create another cool game.

With a couple new additions to the team, we had decided early on that we wanted to try and create a VR game.

It was a unique and challenging experience for me, who had never worked with virtual reality before. But, after learning how it worked with Unity, I learned that it was not really all that different from game development that I had done before.

On this team, I served as the lead narrative and as well as level designer. I worked from the ground-up in creating the world of Sidetracked. I spent hours researching various cultures and religions to formulate a homogenized version of Limbo to keep the game marketable.

The context for the world that I developed revolved around the mysterious beings known as conductors. These conductors fulfilled the role of escorting souls to their final destination. A servant of someone in higher position of authority. Conductors simply completed their tasks without any regard to the plights of their passengers. Until, a wandering spirit “opens the mind” of the conductor that serves as the vessel for the player.

Now being able to see and understand, the player, as the conductor could judge for themselves if the souls they encountered deserved to be saved or not.

The dialogue for the game was created with several branches that the player would be taken on based on their responses to the soul’s story. The system we initially came up with was too large and way out of scope for the time we had. So my producer and I worked tirelessly to simplify the dialogue system. We were successful and three definitive emotional routes were developed and could be seamlessly transitioned with other tracks through the use of nodes and splines.

Along with the world itself, I wrote all of the dialogue featured within the game. Due to issues of scope, the initial story that I wrote for the game was cut and I had to quickly create a shorter story that conveyed the experience of the game to the player. I was able to come up with two introductory stories that would get the player acquainted with the game mechanics and it established the framework for additional stories to be implemented in the future.

For those interested, I included PDF files of the cut story and the new introduction that was implemented into the game, here for viewing.