Writer and Designer
Establish narrative reasoning for players to embark on this adventure
Created increasingly challenging puzzles using elements from "Star Wars"
Programmed bots to make the entire experience autonomous through reactions
Themed the server to correctly engage the players (channel/role names, visual mediums, bots were "droids", etc)
Tuned puzzle difficulty with play testing trials
Designed and encoded special Imperial notes
Quick Summary:
Genre: Puzzler (Discord Escape Room).
Contribution: Writer and Designer. Collaborated with 2 other Writers.
Team: 3 Writers and 4 Designers.
Fun Fact: Imperial Communications is 100% self-sufficient after all the players get added to the server. (Thanks to our handy "Imperial Droid" aka Carl-Bot).
Detailed Overview
Star Wars: Imperial Communications is a game where the player assumes the role of a spy for the Rebellion. Intelligence says that the Empire is working on a massive superweapon that could wipe out the Rebellion extremely quickly. There is a chance of stopping it if the proper information is uncovered. The player's mission is to hack into an Imperial communication channel, look through the codes and puzzles to find the important information about the superweapon.
The player looks through text conversations, encrypted messages, and announcements to find these facts, then the player uses the information to choose the correct code to give to a reprogrammed Imperial droid that is helping the player get through the server. The player looks through the library of Discord reactions to find the one that will give the player access to the next chat. If The player can get through all the chats and puzzles with all the information the player came for, the player wins and is considered a hero of the Rebellion.
This game was incredibly fun to make, and I learned so much about Discord and the bots that can be added to servers. When my group and I were making this game, I even had the idea to help us all get into character, so it looked like the messages were coming from imperial commanders or rebels. This is exemplified in the image below with "Rebel Commander Nathan" speaking. I also renamed the "Carl-bot in the server to be an imperial droid that would give clearance to new recruits.
Immersion is super important for a game like this because it's all about the experience in an escape room. If one part looks out of place then the immersion is broken and players start to dislike what they're doing. It was very interesting to do an escape room format in Discord with the voice chat feature and not actually being in person, so there was less teamwork with the playtesters than we hoped. However, it would stand to reason that if a group of friends were playing this game together, they would definitely be trying to help each other.
