Cold Trust
Solo - NarrativeMy role : Game Designer, Narrative Designer & Writer
Engine : Unreal
More detailed presentation : https://charlotteinfos.wixsite.com/shouil/cold-trust
Complete walkthrough of the game
Cold Trust is a solo adventure game taking its inspiration from Detroit Become Human & Zero Escape.
It is very heavy on narration and relies on plot twists and ambience.
The game was scoped as an AAA game, but we only worked on a vertical slice.
Let’s dive in!
Hired by a private laboratory, 4 scientists are doing research in a polar station.
But when one of them is found murdered, everything starts to shift.
Who did it ? And why ?
Unable to escape, they slowly start to experiment fear, then madness.
The big challenge with Cold Trust was to create an engaging storyline with en engaging cast.
Kyle, Hazeema, Eden and Daan, our 4 scientists
I worked with our character artist on the personnality and origins of the cast, to whom he gave a face and a body.
We then worked on a compelling story, that could drive the curiosity of the player and bring unexpected twists.
Starting from a murder, we uncover a whole scheme, while playing each character at different
moments of the timeline.
And what a timeline !
The full timeline
Because, yes, Cold Trust is a non-linear game.
Our vertical slice focused on the first major choice a player can make while playing,
but we have much much more for them in store !
You can find a detailed Beatchart of the game right here
Excerpt of the Mission Design documentation
One of the things that made me really enthusiast at the idea of working on the game was the intention
of the game artists to do MoCap and voice acting : two things I adore as they are excellent vectors of narration.
I did not get to fully experiment the recordings, but got the pleasure of writing the scripts and help select our comedians.
Noé and Malou, ready for action!
Gamewise, we went for a rather classical approach, using already proven mechanics and only iterated on the mindmap system.
Because we think that before making original games, we needed to make a great game.
Which gave me the time to focus on integration and dialogues!
Using “Not Yet Dialogue”, a plugin, I integrated, corrected and checked every boolean linked to our dialogues.
Excerpt of a dialogue tree
I also conducted small playtests on my work station to check on how the players were
receiving the dialogues and their outcomes. This allowed me to change a few phrases and
integrate more lore in some of the optionnal dialogues.