With Rebuild 3, the similarly large 200K word narrative was delivered as an assortment of procedurally generated events involving a post-apocalyptic settlement.
I even considered writing a young-adult sci-fi novel instead of this game, but I know my strengths lie in programming and game design, and it would be a waste not to combine them with the story I wanted to tell. I grew up an avid reader and writer before games became my life. I’m Sarah Northway, co-founder of Northway Games and creator of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, as well as the narrative city-building series Rebuild and other games. Not a linear visual novel, but a loose and vast narrative intertwined with deckbuilding and stats raising, dynamic yet deterministic.
For our narrative RPG I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, I wanted this: organic worldbuilding, characters with their own lives, replayability, and major events as signposts in a larger narrative space the player can explore. My favorite narratives are ones where the reader – or player – is a participant, taking the author’s text and telling their own stories with it. Solving a mystery in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist How the home-rolled scripting language Exoscript helped us design a flexible open world narrative of nearly 600K words.
