Game Design: 3D Game Kit VII

Narrative.

Seeking new inspiration for my game and needed to work on my narrative, I figured it would be best to approach both of these issues at once. For inspiration, I started reading several stories by H.P Lovecraft and realised the best way for me to create a narrative, would be to write a story and break it up for the player throughout the game. I began writing a story with all the new vocabulary that I had learnt from Lovecraft. The title of the story and the new working title for my game:

The Epitaph of William Dufresne.

William Dufresne was a studious man, with a vast wealth of both knowledge and influence. He and his wife Maria lived a lavish life in their remote estate far from the bustling city of Bordeaux. William was once a renowned explorer now retired from the life and a professor and the local university. William had several heirs most of whom resided within the estate, without thought of working or contributing to society like their father. William held talks within the estate’s grand library, collecting politicians, nobility and merchants all of which would firmly deny their attendance. William believed in changing the world for the better, first through manipulation of parliament and later, through manipulation of the people. William had learnt through his study of the ancient tombs and scripture that filled the grand library, most of which had been ‘liberated’ from the lands he wandered in his youth, that there was very little a singular individual like himself could do to make a better world. His studies led him down a road of similar manipulation, unbeknownst to William, the scriptures he so dutifully recited had ideas of their own. Through some otherworldly force, William found success in his plans for Bordeaux, convincing his subjects that his ideas would result in a better world, with himself at the head. It was in the following years that William witnessed the result of his conviction. The malicious plague gripped at the throat of Bordeaux, twisting flesh and stone alike. Its decadent archways and balustrades were ripped from their holdings by egregious, malformed roots. The face of this devastation still masked, hidden behind the veil separating the realm of man and whatever forsaken eldritch landscape it had previously claimed as its own possible eons ago. William was left to watch the destruction. Hoisted high above the estates main tower and its now crumbling parapets by the roots. This was the punishment the faceless abomination had ordained for William, a horrific lesson for his ignorance and carelessness. William presumably died there, atop the corrupted roots. His family met similar fates although swifter, their bodies were lost in the ruined halls of the estate. All except for one. Charles that simply said; “Return to your home. The earth is split, revealing a maddening darkness. Embrace it or not, all will witness it in time”. Charles made a hurried return for Bordeaux, reaching his ancestry home by rowboat through a nearby estuary now the only possible passage to the manor and the tower beyond. What he hoped to find there he did not know but with his father’s journal he would decipher the mystery of Bordeaux’s condemnation and write his father’s epitaph upon an urn of his ashes.