Interactive Story Proposal

1. Premise and Purpose: The core concept of my interactive story is to create a dating simulation/adventure game, where the player goes on a journey as a girl who gets released from a spell while having lost all her memories. I want my players to want to be in the world I created, or rather, have them want to be the character I created. Since the playable character is not a very neutral character, as in, there is quite a lot of backstory, I want my players to understand who she is as she goes on her journey to help her friends overthrow a demon monarchy. As the journey progresses, the player finds pieces of her memory, which will help the player learn more about her.
2. Core story components:

The setting of the story is going to be in a fantasy world, where the world is ruled by a demon king. Races are divided into factions: Magicians, Demons, Animal-Humans, Orcs.

The player is a half-demon female. Her backstory is that she was sought after by demons for her soul, especially the demon king, because of her half-demon-half-human soul. That particular kind of soul can make demons very powerful when consumed, since a demon-human hybrid is extremely rare. Lucien, the demon prince, was also after her soul, until she saved him from a near-death experience (will figure this out later), and they fall in love with each other. They spent their days together in hiding because of all the demons that were always out to get them. Demon King finds out about their love affair and becomes enraged, sending all the guards to go collect the girl for his feast. Lucien encases her in ice and hides her away so that the demons can’t get to her.

The story begins with the player waking up from an encasing of ice, with no memories of who she was before. A group of adventurers find her and releases the spell placed on her. The player joins the party to try and find her memories while also helping the group with their quest. Lucien joins a bit later, surprised that the player is out of the ice, and tags along with the adventurers while disguising himself as a fellow underclass demon.

The adventurers, Faye, Altair, and Nico, are trying to kill the demon king and overthrow the monarchy.

The concept of my story is based off of the playable character regaining her memory, and some memories can only be unlocked through different story routes. This means that the game has replay value so the player can try to play the different routes to see all the ideas laid out for the game.

3. Interactive elements:

The narrative structure will follow that of the “3-act”. The interactivity structures will be a mix of the “string of pearls” and the “branching structure”. The main storyline will be of an adventure, and the branches will give the player a chance to interact and learn more about the love interests.

Certain characters can only be “unlocked” by specific choices. There will be 3 male, where one male character is only unlocked through a special route, and 1 female characters. The special character is unlocked through the girl route, where the girl is best friend.

There will be different endings for each character: good, neutral, and bad. The goal is to have a different interaction for each character while following the basic plot of the story. This will help keep the game like a dating simulation while also following the adventure line.

4. Implementation: My current plan is to use either Twine or Ren’Py to create my interactive story. I would ultimately like to use Ren’Py, but the only thing holding me back is the coding portion of it. Since, I am not too familiar with coding, I think Twine will be a better option until I learn the coding language for Ren’Py. I really like the fact that Twine is able to work with variables, since my story is a dating simulation, keeping track of things like “affection levels” will be very helpful.

I think Ren’Py would be very useful to create a better visualization to my story, since it is a program made for creating visual novels.