Tony Porteous
Technical Designer
Jekyll / Hyde
Jekyll / Hyde - Can You Get Away With Murder?
Mobile Driven Augmented Reality Game
February/March 2020
What foul deeds did you do last night? Jekyll / Hyde will plunge you into a world where your memory can’t be trusted, and neither can those around you.
Produced in association with VAULT Festival, Jekyll / Hyde blends mobile game, scavenger hunt, narrative storytelling, and real-world characters in a twisted tale.
Creative director and lead game designer Tony Porteous creates an easy-to-operate and exceptionally intuitive design
Jekyll/Hyde is a triumph in the new wave of immersive theatre
Role
Lead Designer, Technical Developer
- Game Design: Designed the game-flow to meet a series of tight real-world constraints. Developed new tools and a new branching path storylet system.
- Content Creation: Designed the in-game scenarios, and all digital assets. Wrote the final in-game narrative content.
- Coding: Developed all the new features for this game, and programmed the digital UX.
- Leadership: I directed the work of other content creators on the project.
The Challenges of a Real-World Narrative
"What Did We Do Last Night?"
Jekyll/Hyde Is a real-world storytelling game, played by 90 players all moving independantly around the game zone. Our story was tied to real world locations, but we couldn't predict the order, or if, players would visit them. How do you build a compelling story when you don't know the order of events?
My solution was a three pronged strategy:
- Break the Story into Quests - I used statistical theory to identify the correct number of sub-plots to meet our physical constraints. We broke the story into 18 sub-plots each at a different hub.
- Utilize Storylets - I implemented storylet as a style of content delivery that is naturally order independent. This used a madness mechanic to crescendo the player's correctly depending on the order they visited locations.
- Flexible Narrative Framing - I chose a narrative based on recovering memories of the prior night's misdeeds. This context naturally told a story in snapshots. With careful with our wording, this left space for the players to determine their own order.
Tools to Empower Actors
Experimenting with Delivering Data to Craft Unique Scenes
The Cast acted as quest givers, ambushing teams with surprise events as they explored. I wanted to experiment with digitally passing the players decisions to our cast, so they could customize their approach and attitude to the individuals.
This system investigated:
- Which data could be best leveraged to craft an impactful scene?
- What UX best empowers the cast, while disguising it from the players?
- How much information can the cast retain?
- Where could our actors position themselves for maximum throughput?
Credits
- Lead Designer: Tony Porteous
- Producer: Sofia Romualdo
- Design: Amy Strike, Sofial Romualdo, Michelle Hudson, Elizabeth Simoens
- Writing: Will Drew, Tony Porteous