The Colony Stands for All is a dialogue-based investigative narrative game set in a royal palace of anthropomorphic ants. The player uncovers the truth by speaking with characters, gathering evidence and making choices that affect both relationships and the final outcome.
The story explores the topics of hierarchy and control through an ant colony monarchy, where roles are defined by nature, featuring 10 characters and 5 endings.
My responsibilites included:
- Providing creative vision for a team of 12 students;
- Writing the narrative and all the dialogue;
- Designing the level;
- Creating charts & technical documents;
- Designing a reusable narrative system for the investigation;
- Iterating on the story and redesinging the level based on playtesting.
Starting out with the story: going backwards
Since it was meant to be a narrative-heavy game, my design process began with figuring out the main elements of the story. I started out by defining the setting, after which I analyzed classic detective story tropes to base the characters on, such as the culprit, victim, red herring, etc.
I developed the plot from the ending backwards. I wrote a rough version of the final scene first, since I knew I wanted the player to have agency at the end based on their earlier decisions. I built the rest of the mystery around this outcome.
I worked closely with the lead programmer and helped implementation by creating condition sheets and flow diagrams early in development. They showed the relationship between characters, dialogue options, evidence and the quest system.
Character concept brainstorming during pre-production.
Condition chart showing interconnected variables.
Dialogue implemented in Twine for testing and iteration.
Dialogue System Design
Because of the short production time, I needed a system that was reusable and allowed fast dialogue writing. To achieve this, each character was built around two main dialogue branches and two longer interaction rounds.
The key rule was that every player choice had to work with multiple possible responses. This meant writing lines that remained valid even when the conversation branched in different directions. It was challenging at first, but it made the process much faster and helped keep the dialogue focused on the core plot.
This approach also created the illusion of deeper player choice without requiring fully unique branches for every scenario.
Example of a conversation mock-up used for designing dialogue progression and possible outcomes.
Chart explaining the “social boss fight” system.
Investigation as Gameplay
The early part of each main conversation is designed as an investigation phase. The player learns about the character they talk with and chooses how to approach them, for example through empathy, honesty, or intimidation, without these approaches being explicitly communicated.
To support this, I created a hidden scoring system:
- Player starts at 3 out of 5 points
- Each response adds or removes a point
- At 5 points, the character opens up
- At 1 point, the character refuses to share further details.
Showing this system in the UI would have made conversations feel like a guessing game, so I chose to hide it and let players rely on their intuition instead.
Level Design: as dictated by the narrative
My first level concepts consisted of more and bigger rooms than the final version, because I initially wanted to use doors to control story progression, preventing players from accessing information they were not meant to discover yet.
However, playtests revealed several issues with this approach:
- Spaces were too large and didn’t have enough meaningful content,
- Players had trouble finding clues,
- Navigation became confusing, especially with fixed cameras.
To solve this, I reduced the size of the accessible areas of the palace. Instead of blocking players with doors, certain dialogue options are hidden until enough evidence is collected. This means that if the player lacks the required information, they are encouraged to explore further. This change required more dialogue and design work, but it made the detective gameplay significantly deeper and improved pacing a lot.
Reworked level from top-down view.
Top-down level plan with narrative flow.
Designing the camera system
I initially wanted to use fully fixed cameras to create cinematic compositions, but this caused navigation issues and confusion in players, while it also required us designers to set up an enormous amount of camera transitions to make sure there were no blindspots.
To improve this, I studied dialogue-heavy games by Telltale and Supermassive. I noticed that their cameras are often placed slightly out of bounds to maintain framing and keep players from clipping through them. In many narrow spaces they only use one or two cameras to avoid disorientation.
Based on this, I redesigned the system. Our cameras remained fixed in position but would rotate to follow the player, and I used fewer, but more deliberate camera angles.
This change improved clarity, reduced design complications, and maintained the cinematic feel I was going for.
The original fixed camera system (above) and the reworked player-tracking system (below).
