Screen

OVERVIEW


Twenty-Fourteen

Narrative Game

You play as the Big Brother, 30 years after the events of 1984.

Start

Summary

In Twenty-Fourteen, you are tasked with working to administrate your regime, military powers, and keep an eye on your enemy as well as your growing son by making all sorts of decisions through perusing confidential documents in a dystopian future society.

My Role: Game Design, Gameplay Programmer, UI/UX, Artist
Date: 2021.11-2021.12
Genre: Narrative, Simulator
Tools: Unity, Twine, GitHub
Play Here: game page
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Gameplay



Opening
GrabFile
MakeDecisions
DiscardClean
FeedFish
Juice
Documents


Design Goal

We explored a choice-maker mechanic for the narrative experience that not only tells the story but also constructs the worldview in each file and document. There are mysteries are hidden in the files waiting for the player to find out.

The simulator of the desk is designed to create a rhythm of decision-making. All the elements on the desk contrived to a metaphor of the choice results, which strengthens the storytelling brings the player into Big Brother's mental world.

Game Design


Inspiration

The original concept of Twenty Fourteen stems directly from the team members’ interest in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Inspired by the totalitarian society portrayed in the story and fightented by what individuals’ life would be like under the tyranny of a dictator like the Big Brother, we want to take a look at the story from a different perspective by focusing on the Big Brother, who acts as a mysterious symbol rather than an appearing character in the original work. We also discovered our interest in expanding the worldview of 1984 and seeking its possibility in a more distant future. The result of such inspirations became Twenty Fourteen, the continuation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, set in 30 years after the end of the novel.



The fascination of a dystopian future society is irresistible. Such a concept broadly opens up designers’ imaginations. The combination of diving into the most primitive nature of human beings and discovering fancy future technologies is one that draws all of the team members’ attention to. 1984 differentiates itself from other similar works by adopting vocabulary that vividly represents both the concept and the context. Through the interesting design of technologies, the audience is also able to perceive the actual terror of a totalitarian society that monitors its people at all times. Based on these aspects, we chose to expand on the original work in mainly two areas: the worldview and the characters.

Challenge

The challenge of continuing the worldview design is how to incorporate our original thoughts carefully without breaking the rules established by the original work. As such, the initial stage of brainstorming largely focused on defining the current state of all concepts from the original on top of designing new ideas. As the setting of 2014 is 30 years later, to portray Oceania’s increase in power, we decided to introduce Oceania as the only superstate in the world. While the people of Oceania are instructed to believe that both Eastasia and Eurasia are defeated already, following the same manner as in the original 1984, it is never explicitly clarified if the case is true or not. On the other hand, to ensure that Oceanians are satisfied with their living conditions, a distinct comparison is necessary. The result of this is the statement that the rest of the defeated Eurasians have escaped to the Moon where they suffer from an extremely terrible living condition. This is also a metaphor for our actual world, where countries would exaggerate negative facts about other parts of the world in order to make citizens content.

Designing the Big Brother was the most interesting yet challenging part of the project. Much space has been left to us for the character’s mostly symbol-like presence in 1984. However, this also openly challenges us to design the character in a style that best presents a totalitarian dictator to our audience. Diving into the mentality of an old dictator, we decided that the incapability to stay in control and fear of losing power should be the direction that we present Big Brother to our audience. However, we would also like to express the irony of a dystopian totalitarianism where there has never been any chance of overthrowing as long as the dictator sits on his throne. Combining such thoughts, we were able to have the main plot of the game, where Big Brother struggles to stay in power as the New Brotherhood is on the rise to take over the nation. The two supporting characters in the game, Darwin Stewart and O’Connor, serve to have opposite influence on players’ mentality. Stewart, Big Brother’s son, is portrayed as dedicated to technological development and communicates on a much less frequency compared to O’Connor. O’Connor, on the other hand, often sends reports to Big Brother exposing potential individuals who are involved with the New Brotherhood.

Designing the Big Brother was the most interesting yet challenging part of the project. Much space has been left to us for the character’s mostly symbol-like presence in 1984. However, this also openly challenges us to design the character in a style that best presents a totalitarian dictator to our audience. Diving into the mentality of an old dictator, we decided that the incapability to stay in control and fear of losing power should be the direction that we present Big Brother to our audience. However, we would also like to express the irony of a dystopian totalitarianism where there has never been any chance of overthrowing as long as the dictator sits on his throne. Combining such thoughts, we were able to have the main plot of the game, where Big Brother struggles to stay in power as the New Brotherhood is on the rise to take over the nation. The two supporting characters in the game, Darwin Stewart and O’Connor, serve to have opposite influence on players’ mentality. Stewart, Big Brother’s son, is portrayed as dedicated to technological development and communicates on a much less frequency compared to O’Connor. O’Connor, on the other hand, often sends reports to Big Brother exposing potential individuals who are involved with the New Brotherhood.

Game Design


Story

scripts

Sketches & Prototype

sketch_1 sketch_2 Prototype

Game Logic

logic

Self Reflection

I take some of the programming work, including file system, mouse interaction, and UI logic. The file system is part of the main mechanic that has functions like grabbing and reading a file, signing a file. I also set up Big Brother’s workflow through 7 days and ensured each file had correct triggers that could change story branches. According to the initial scripts created by Luke, I made some UI sketching of a top-down view concept, considering the limited space, which was integrated with the game... >>More

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