Course Project: Karrapo

<Karrapo> is an Visual Novel Game made by Deig and Unity, which is also a solo course project at Game Design A1N in University of Skövde. The story tells a solitary man try hard to find the real relationship in this anti-utopia, AI controlled future society. In the game, Player will chat with a mystery girl called 'Samantha' on the online chatroom to build the deep connection, and also find out the real identity of her and yourself.

Inspiration

This project inspired from movie <her> and <UP>, where they all share the mutual narrative core about loneliness. Furthermore, the reflection of AI-human relationship is also the most interesting topic these years. Great visual novel games, like <Disco Elysium>, they provide not only the marvelous story with deep resonance, but also the immersive game play experience, that is providing meaningful choices for the players.

Narration Design

The core story is based on the chat software like WhatsApp, that serves two narrative intentions: 1. try to hide the real identity of Samantha, people may not sure about whether she is the AI or real human; 2. Giving the twist of the story at the beginning, where the player (Nick) is pretending as a young man to cat-fishing.

Meaningful Choices

For most of dialogue system based games, making decision is the main game play. Some of the choices serve as the narrative interaction, which won't effect the gaming progress. Some of them are important, will shape the character's next movement and have great impact on how the story goes on. In <Karrapo>, meaningful choices happen at the puzzle scenes and dialogues with Samantha. On the one hand, the puzzle in the game is trying to build the interactive game play; On the other hand, the different branches with Samantha will lead the players to different endings, and express the player's own opinions.

Evaluation & What's Next?

This is one month course project and finally the demo completed everything I planned at first, which is already a great success for me. Although this game also received a lot of positive feedback from fellow students, there are indeed some works can be done to further improve this project. For example, the narrative rhythm, some interactions like going back to the chatroom may spend quite time to do the transition, that may lose the player's patience.

Access

You can download it from Itch.io here:

Karrapo by maxfieldzhang95