Here are some papers and screen prototypes I’ve designed for a visual novel game, which presents two different moments of the game development process. First, we tested our ideas out in a paper card prototype. It was also a reasonable approach to test the game’s mechanics before transitioning to the digital version.

As a disclaimer, the characters presented in both prototypes are placeholders; I drew them as a style guide for the artist who draws the actual characters for the digital version of the game. Developed using the Ren’Py engine, the game was part of a research project aimed at understanding how to better engage players with moral dilemmas and ethical decisions throughout the game’s choices and narrative pieces.

In this narrative, players receive an offer to be a partner in a paparazzi agency, in which the job is to hire and manage the paparazzi tasks. The moral and ethical issues are exposed while the paparazzi are performing the assignment. The idea is to make players handle the tenue line of relevant information and gossip involved in a paparazzi job. Would you choose to expose or do not expose people? How harmful may a photo be to someone? Is it worth trying to make money by destroying people’s reputations or lives? Those questions are a tiny sample of the issues the game intended to make players face and go through.

As a product of this research, a paper was presented in the International Communication Association (ICA) 2018, in Prague. In addition, the game was exhibited/demoing in the Meaningful Play Conference, Michigan 2018.

Card and Digital Versions