After you lose your loving partner, Dela, in a car accident, you find a service that can bring her back to life in a digital reincarnation. But should you?
Role: Co-Director, Writer, NLP Conversation Designer & Lead Engineer
Tools: Unity3D, IBM Watson, Sketch
Discarnate is a mobile game in which an advanced technological breakthrough allows you to bring your loving partner, Dela, back from the dead. However, the realization that she is not the same without her body leads an unhappy Dela to question whether she is the same person. We started with the idea of embodiment and identity and built Discarnate around it, bringing in other subjects like AI and Ethics into this game.
We needed to create a strong connection between the player and the character, Dela. For this, we designed Dela as a virtual being, with her own wants and needs, and who would remember your conversations and react to your messages in real time. For this, I designed a Natural Language System that kept track of user conversations and alluded to them at later points in the narrative. Using IBM Watson, we also extracted emotions from player responses and made Dela react emotionally to the emotional context of our player’s responses.
We decided to use the familiar interface of mobile devices and set the story in the near future. The players’ pre-existing knowledge of navigating mobile OS meant that they played and interacted with the game as if it was their own phone. For this, I created the game to simulate a mobile operating system, complete with voice notes, photographs, and different apps and screens.
Leveraging a school assignment on exploring non-linear narratives, Rudi (my co-director) and I placed the phone conversations in a way that forced players to get key information at different points of the game. This was a good design as it kept our players at the edge of their seats!
This was my favorite part of the game. I explored the design of intents, entities and dialogue structures in the Natural Language Processing system in very interesting ways that could fool players into thinking they were having conversations with real people. One of the most important ideas I took away from this was to end a conversation with leading questions. Otherwise, players could break the fragile illusion by talking about subjects entirely out of the domain of the conversations we designed! Which, if you’ve ever tested the limits of Siri, is not the most intriguing conversation.
Since we needed the conversations to follow the narrative beats we had designed, I developed internal systems that kept track of what the player was doing in the game, the information they had accessed and not accessed to trigger messages from other characters, music cues, or conversation triggers with Dela to bring it all back to the narrative beats. It was a lot of fun designing these systems!
To learn more about some reflections on this project, check out my blog post on the design reflections.