Overview

I took a course on Narratives in Digital Culture during my Master's program. During the semester, my group and I worked on a short game with a branching narrative as our assignment, and that game is Mud City Chronicles. The game is about a bank heist, during which the protagonist (you) steal the Royal Rose of Morocco, and the story is retold via alibi stories. The idea behind this project was to gamify this narrative, encouraing the player to revisit the story to explore the alternative choices leading to different outcomes. However, the game was created in a way that each alibi works as a complete story on its own, so the narrative gives a sense of completeness even without having experienced all three stories.

In the game, you are in the interrogation room with a detective, and your task is to choose your alibi to save yourself, your partner, the loot, or possibly all three. You do this by selecting two of the three clickable images on the evidence board (there are some additional images that can't be clicked on). Then you click on "I got it" to lock in your selection, and simply walk the detective through your alibi (using "A" and "D" or the arrow keys), and once you're done, you'll find out the result of your story.

Once you start the game, the detective is talking to you, so be sure to give it a moment and let him finish what he has to say. This was a nice and short experiment with narratives and gamification. If you're interested, you can try the game by clicking on the image below (takes you to a new page):