Arkruine
Arkruine
Jonathan Sin and Tianxiao Zheng, 2025
https://imagine-automata3.itch.io/
This Game was developed as part of the final assignment for the course ENG 328 Writing for Games and Narrative Design (Fall 2025), University of Toronto Mississauga. The work was supervised by Professor Bruno R. Véras, Assistant Professor, LTA, Game Studies Program, Department of English and Drama, UTM.
Abstract
Rogue-like, narrative exploration, dice-based encounters. A ruin-crawling journey through the abandoned MotherArk with Antaia and Takol. Uncover lost memories, shifting floors, and hidden truths beneath mechanical decay.
Authored Design Statement
The game’s structure is partly inspired by Rogue-like games, such as Dead Cells. We do not present the story in a completely linear way. Instead, we create a repeated exploration to reveal new details and hidden clues when the player returns. However, unlike a traditional open-world game where the player can freely roam around, our design only allows this return through death. We want the player to share the protagonist’s sense of disorientation at the start and slowly rebuild their sense of identity through exploration. The intended experience is one of discovering who you are by uncovering the traces left behind.
The initial concept grew from Jonathan’s experience writing TRPG-style narratives, which often rely on fragmented worldbuilding and open-ended exploration. Then we brainstormed how to shape the story in a way that feels different from a traditional interactive narrative. We wanted to avoid the usual weaknesses of linear, story-driven games, where players either forget early elements and clues or lose immersion due to heavy text. In this case, we implement the rogue-like storytelling structure. This allows the player to understand the narrative more easily without long text explanations. The main challenge was ensuring that the players feel immersed throughout the game experience, which will be discussed in the next section.
Although the project instructions emphasized clarity and playability first, we still placed a high priority on the game’s aesthetic elements. We looked at classic works like Zork and believed a purely textual game would easily break the immersion. Keeping the player immersed at all times became one of our core goals. To address this, we incorporated images and music throughout the game to strengthen the immersion. These aesthetic elements help players step into the protagonist’s perspective, encouraging them to make decisions as the character rather than as an outside observer.
Our design was strongly influenced by Henry Jenkins’s discussion of Game Design as Narrative Architecture. Jenkins argues that game designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces (Jenkins par. 5). Following this idea, we wanted our players to discover the game’s worldbuilding and the protagonist’s identity through exploration. Many interactive narrative games rely on heavy text at the beginning to explain their world and setting. However, players cannot retain so much information at once or might lack the patience to read. As a result, these games struggle to draw players into the world quickly and sometimes fail to create any sense of immersion at all. For our game, we established the tone and world from the moment it started. The visuals and sound immediately bring the player into a dark, cold, and quiet metallic environment.
Through this project, we realized that theoretical knowledge does not automatically bring a well-functioning game. Since we are using Twine2 for the first time in development, we encountered so many problems and bugs in the development process. After many fixes and searches for tutorials online, we eventually managed to create the game we envisioned.tral,
