I’m so used to seeing game development management sims that boils down development to bubbles or numbers. Merely treating your employees as little more than characters in the games they themselves are making. While real-life seldom boils down to telling people yes or no, Game Director Story puts more than just a face on those pixelated people and wants you to deal with them as both colleagues and friends while dealing with the consequences.
Game Director Story tasks you with heading up a group of college friends who have just been given the keys to their own game studio. As the game director, your job is to manage the teams, make sure people aren’t demoralized or working too hard, and deal with the publisher. The scenario presented in the demo had my publisher asking me to get a trailer out for E3. I had several decisions on my hands and managed to get the publisher to agree with a teaser trailer instead. Freeing up my team to make a really good teaser trailer instead of a passable full trailer. Along the way, I had to manage my team to make sure they weren’t working overtime and make sure the core culture of my studio was a good fit for everyone. The day came and our teaser trailer was a big hit but, unfortunately, because it took so long and the publisher wasn’t happy with what we had done to make sure the teaser trailer was the best we had.
All decisions have consequences and I’m hoping it’s not all ups and downs, but life is like that. Managing a studio can’t be easy and you have to make sacrifices along the way. Though my actions had consequences, I was happy with the ones chosen. I didn’t hit a fail state for playing the game my way and instead, things played out and kept going. I really enjoyed being able to go through this two-week process my way and see the fruits of my labor.
Each of the characters in the game looks like a plush animal doll that makes different faces based on the choices in the conversation you choose. All the characters talk to you over text as if you’re having text conversations with each of them, though the implication is that they’re visiting you in your office. You have silhouette avatars of each character that shows up next to the chat window. Each teammate vying for your attention will only wait so long before making a decision on their own. There were several times where I had to go home at the end of the day before I had finished talking to everyone, which was a bummer.
At the bottom of the screen, there are various icons representing how well your game is coming along and various other meters to determine how well you’re doing. By making a fiscal decision you could improve your relationship with the publisher. Likewise, decisions that didn’t force overtime or crunch resulted in a better relationship with your team. I was weighing decisions based on what would be best for the team, the game, and my emotional reactions. Some of these decisions were tough and I think Game Director Story succeeds in what it tries to accomplish by evoking this struggled judgment call.
Game Director Story is part of our LudoNarraCon 2021 coverage and has a planned release date of 2021 on Steam.
