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Legend of the Undergrowth
A 3D role-playing action game where the player takes the role of the mushroom guardian of a forest which is mainly inhabited by other mushrooms. The player must rescue the ‘shroomlings’, the baby mushrooms who have been captured by the evil wizard and his army of evil mushrooms.
Available at: https://murio1126.itch.io/legend-of-the-undergrowth-beta
Created using Unity by Team Mycelia for a class project.
Role: Narrative Designer.
Final Narrative Document
Process
Prior to role assignments, the team collectively pitched numerous individual ideas for the project to gain a better grasp of each member's interests and provided insight on the types of games everyone would enjoy working on. This allowed everyone's ideas to be considered and created a friendly environment where each of us could take inspiration from one another during the ideation and pre-production stage, even if their ideas were not chosen. I proposed two different concepts.
My first idea was a game in which the player is a parasite who is searching for a suitable host for itself by taking control of various people through multiplication, with the main object being to take over a certain area such as an office workplace. It would feature two gameplay sections. One part of the game would require the player to fight against large hordes of enemies simultaneously, similar to game of the hack-and-slash and roguelike genres, while the other would utilise a visual novel inspired gameplay style, where the player interacts with other characters and must behave like their host without raising suspicion by selecting the correct dialogue options. To contrast the horror of its actions, I thought it also would be interesting to make the parasite cute and small, emphasising how despite its size, it is still dangerous and able to cause havoc, even for characters multiple times bigger than itself.
My second idea was a game where the player is a grim reaper in-training who must pass their final assessment to become an official grim reaper, which involves retrieving five ghosts from the living world and guiding them into the afterlife. The gameplay would feature a collection of different mini-games, inspired by party games, and each would be based on a different genre, such as action fighting, puzzle and role-playing. I thought this would be an effective way of including the team’s interests in the game. Each ghost would have been based on one of the five stages of grief (the ‘Kübler-Rossmodel’), consisting of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Their type affects the method (the mini-game which they must play) that the player needs to utilise to bring them into the afterlife. For example, a ghost based on the anger stage could require the player to defeat them in a fight, which would result in the ghost releasing their anger and calming down enough to listen to the player and enter the afterlife. However, upon further reflection, I recognised that if this idea was chosen, it could have created a heavy workload for the programmer(s) and designer(s) as it would involve a lot of programming and designing for significantly different gameplay mechanics.
Eventually, the group voted for a game concept centred around mushrooms proposed by one of our other team members. Afterwards, each member independently further iterated on the concept and formed our own developed ideas based on the initial concept. I created one game concept that I presented to the team, where the player takes the role of a mushroom who must return the Grand Tree back to life, creating a document that included my ideas for the gameplay. Later, this stage of early ideation influenced my narrative pre-production, as I used elements of this concept, as well as its inspirations, when brainstorming plot and story ideas.
I was assigned Narrative Designer as my primary role after the game was further solidified. The main elements of the narrative that were established at this point was that the player lives in a grove with other fellow mushrooms and must defeat a threat either to the forest or their personal life. A fantasy role-playing game was the genre that our team decided on.
I started my role by conducting research into how various mushrooms and fungi live and function in forest environments as inspiration for the game world to ensure specific elements of the narrative, such as the characters and how this world operates, would remain reasonable to avoid breaking immersion.
One helpful discovery for narrative ideation that I explored during the research stage was the parasitic nature of certain species of fungi and their possible applications in reality, such as for feeding and survival. This strongly influenced various narrative ideas for worldbuilding and characters, and additionally provided links to reality that could help make it easier for players to understand how everything functions by having a real life point of comparison. Another element of the world that was explored was the relationship between fungi and the environment they reside in; specifically, how they co-exist alongside the trees and plants inside the forest. Fungi and the plantation around them can share a friendly relationship, which provided ideas for possible motivations of the player character. If the forest and plant life are in danger, the mushrooms’ survival would therefore also be at risk, as they are less prepared and lack awareness of incoming natural threats, along with having less access to nutrients that are needed to survive.
I also researched and took inspiration from various real-life forests that have rumours of being haunted and were utilised as analogues for the game's setting. Having comparable locations for players to link with the environment could make it easier for players to immerse themselves into the world. Various elements of these forests, such as the foxfire of the mushrooms and their use of spore to protect themselves served as the reasons why the game's forest is primarily inhabited by the mushrooms and how it has maintained its peaceful nature until the appearance of the wizard.
After completing the research, I further ideated the plot and characters for the game before creating the narrative document.
For most of the story ideas, the beginning sentence defines the player character’s role and living situation, the second to fourth sentences describe the conflict and the main foe(s) of the player, and the final sentence specifies the player’s final objective. To retain the focus on the full picture and elements that will impact the gameplay and direction of the game, I avoided writing any descriptions of how the world operates, deciding to leave that for a later stage in production. Creating a clear list of information to include along with a sentence limit accelerated the ideation process, with the first attempt with a single idea, and the second attempt with several ideas taking roughly the same portion of time to produce.
I also generated various ideas for enemies that would fit into the narrative to help with the artists' work in creating visuals. After concept artwork of the enemies was completed, I discussed which enemies should be incorporated into the first level and further developed by the artists with the level designer and producer. The enemy that was agreed upon and included within the game was the slime, as it was a simpler design to model and would be easier to animate due to the lack of a skeleton or anatomy to consider the movement of. Additionally, we observed that other role-playing games had slimes as weak enemies, typically appearing near the beginning of the game. This could provide a sense of familiarity for players who have previous experience with the genre, making it easier for them to gauge the power of the enemy and strengthening the reasoning for including this enemy for the first level.
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