Sarah just wanted answers… An investigative narrative game about conspiracies and online radicalization. Untangle the web but be warned: your clicks have consequences.
Welcome to MIX, an online news sharing platform tailored to your own interests. The MIX Archive is an investigative narrative game that explores the depths of conspiracy rabbit holes and how people fall into them.
Itch Page Description. Click here to play this game!
I worked as the game designer, programmer, tech artist as well as UI engineer of this game. I created the search system, title screen UI design and the article system of this game.
Why a conspiracy game?
More than 30 percentage of American don’t believe in Vaccine. Why? Answering this question simply saying lack of education or lack of knowledge seems to be to broad and general. Internet provides information as well as misinformation. That’s where conspiracy and internet rabbit hole begins.
How do we create a narrative that educates people about misinformation and conspiracy theories using the same mechanics that make them spread in real life? Our creative goal of designing this game revolves around answering the question, and the Mix Archive is us narrating what we think is the answer. We want to demonstrate how conspiracies flourish due to psychological and technological factors.
Game Loop
As social media being one of the platform where most misinformation and conspiracies flow. We created a fictional social media platform where player can search for news articles, share them to their feed and interact with people. When designing a narrative mystery game, it’s crucial to control the story beats so player can have a sense of discovering secrets.
Inspired by the game, Her Story, we created a game loop where player can search any keyword in our database, and the search result will provides player news articles containing that keyword. By learning more and more keywords about the fictional conspiracy we created in the game, the player will reach key articles and progress the story by sharing the article to their social media page.
Building the world
As the lead coder of this project, the key features that I had to create is the search engine. Here is me getting a little bit nerdy.
Search Engine and Article Data Structure
The system uses a google sheet where the narrative designer, Jet, writes articles in. Unity will pull the newest version out of the spreedsheet and convert it to a json file. Using the Json file, it grabs each article inside of the Json file and turn them into a scriptable object.
With all scripitable object in the database, whenever the player searches a keyword, the program checks all article for the keyword. However, one challenge is how could we control the story beat so the player won’t see the deepest secret when searching the word “is” or “and”. The scriptable objects themselves in the spreadsheet has a priority valuable connected to them where the narrative designer can tweak around to set how important an article is. With this, if us, the game designer, when playtesting finds out one story beat being too soon. We could just change the priority number in the spreadsheet to make it harder to appear.
The UI manager takes control from here, rendering the article scriptable object into four different prefabs based on which newspaper site this article is. Each prefab has several preset textmeshpro UI objects attach to it, which are going to immediately update its placeholder text with information inside of the prefabs.
Notification and messaging
Since we want to create the feeling of conspiracy going out of control. It is not possible to do it with just player searching for articles. We need NPCs. We created the comments system on the player’s social media page so that whenever player click on the share button, random username will comment on player’s action by commenting on the post with a randomly generated comment.
We also want to have key characters interact with the player, so we created the message system, which will trigger automatically when the player discovers key articles or hitting a certain number of shared articles. These are created with a overall narrative system inspecting player’s status of sharing articles and reading articles, and will update the game correspondingly.
Title Screen UI
I also designed the title screen of the game. I started designing it by researching on some generic trending web design, since our game is related to that.
I wanted to make each one of the option feels like a thing that a user would do to a social media log in page. So I made a mock up screen in figma, simulating what would happen if the player hovers over the new game button.
By starting the new game, the main character Sarah logs into her social media and start browsing the news articles.
Based on this concept, I made something in Unity like this:
Chros Wang 