In Written In Stone players explore the reinterpretation of the Res Gestae, a piece of ancient writing documenting the accomplishments of Emperor Augustus.
The game tracks the legacy of Emperor Augustus through time, revealing how his self-aggrandized narrative from the Res Gestae is not relegated to old conversations in musty libraries. The game reveals how Emperor Augustus is continuously deified, bringing players through classrooms, online Reddit forums, and Italy under Mossolini.
The goal was to encourage players' interest in ancient history while raising their awareness of the dangers of accepting a singular historical perspective as an undisputed fact.
This theme guided me to the format of a visual novel, which I believe captures the restriction and frustration of these one-track historical narratives. Aiming to recreate the blocky and pixelated style of 90s Full Motion Video (FMV)-based computer games such as Night Trap (1992) and Phantasmagoria (1995), this game uses live-action dialogue trees to examine and re-examine the complex legacy of Emperor Augustus.
True to the experience of a 90s FMV, the interactivity in Written in Stone at first seems minimal. Many of the cutscenes serve the purpose of delivering information and, at first, players may be surprised by the option to interact with the characters. As the game progresses, the player’s choices are semi-secretly being tracked and used to generate an "inquisitive" score based on the amount of questions they ask when interacting with the dialogue menus. There is no immediate punishment for failing to be inquisitive, but players who do not ask questions in the interactive dialogue menus miss the "real" story of the game.
This is the experience of learning about the Roman Empire. The field of Classics has been reshaped and re-used by white supremacists and fascists to justify harmful beliefs. If students and history enthusiasts are not critical of their sources, they can fall for ancient and modern disinformation.
The first version of the game was entirely text-based and built in Twine, an open-source interactive fiction tool used by game designers like Anna Anthropy and Zoë Quinn.
Later, I began filming the cutscenes and rebuilt the game in RenPy, another open-source interactive novel engine. RenPy allowed me to code in Python and gave me greater control over the play experience. This is the current downloadable version.
Creating this game allowed me to utilize my skills in videography and post-production, including chroma key editing and visual effects. While I love the innovation of new FMVs like those created by Sam Barlow, I wanted to recreate the aesthetic of 1990s CD-ROM FMVs. This required a high amount of post-processing, as I took crisp 21st century video clips and heavily edited them to create the slow, posturized 90s appearance.It was a labor of love to make it look this bad.