What is Dyscourse?
At Owlchemy Labs, wed played enough resource management-centric survival games to know that we wanted to make something different and focus on the human element. We want to explore people at their best, their worst, and everything in between. Dyscourse focuses on the interactions, tough decisions, bonds, and betrayals of a small group of survivors. What's a greater threat to the survivors: the dangers of the unforgiving island theyve been cast upon, or the threat of their fellow man?
Story
Playthroughs on a single scenario in Dyscourse yield vastly different player-stories depending on how you play. If you and 10 friends play one scenario, its likely that youll each end up a vastly different course of events. Your buddy might be telling you how his group crashed and burned by Day 5, while you managed to get 3 survivors safely to rescue by day 10. Your choices directly determine who does or does not make it out alive in the end.
We not only make the claim to have expansive and dynamic story branching, but are subscribing to that as a core part of our design philosophy. With other narrative driven games, choices can certainly be presented to the player, but the stark realities of game development significantly limit the amount to which a choice can affect the playthrough. In many games, you have expensive voice acting, as well as large 3d environments created by huge teams of artists and level designers. It's simply not feasible to build 10 or 20 different fully-featured environments, only to have a playthrough only reveal a fraction of the content, so every choice ends up looping back to the same core story beats, with slight amounts of customization to make players feel like their choices make some kind of difference. It's the reality of content constraints.
Dyscourse, however, turns that whole problem on its head. We can provide a dynamic story space that branches wildly because we aren't constrained to needing specific voice acting content, or the manual creation of separate new environments for each scene that we want to play out in the game. We use the whole island as our narrative playground, and with new content being driven by text (which is inexpensive and quick), we can allow for tons of different playthroughs with different storylines at a fraction of the time and cost. We think thats pretty novel and really freaking awesome.
Gameplay
When it comes to the actual gameplay, Dyscourse is not merely a glorified Choose Your Own Adventure story. Were focusing in on compelling narrative that drives interesting gameplay through multiple innovative mechanics.
Weve built out an AI interaction system, complete with sneaking, hunting, projectile weaponry, and fight-or-flight mechanisms.
Additionally, the island you crash land on is extremely large and, unfortunately, you didnt think to bring your map to said random island. How unprepared! Thankfully, you have an excellent memory. The ability to recall events and locations stored within the murky depths of your brain is one of the key ways we allow you to navigate our world efficiently.
If youve been to a place, you toss down what we call a memory marker. Once youve placed one or more of these markers, you can pull up your Mind Map and recall that location, which lays down a convenient set of mental footsteps, allowing you to retrace your steps to that prior location. If one of the other characters has been to or has seen a specific location, they too can suggest an outing to that location, and lead you along their own mental path via placed footsteps. Excellent!
$40.000?
A game like this definitely costs more than $40,000 to make, youre right. Weve been able to utilize money from sales of prior game sales but we need some extra help to reach the required amount of money to make this game possible. Also Space Marines.
