The Next Few Minutes
The Next Few Minutes is a short story in the visual novel style. You play as a unnamed heavenly being who is put in charge of the world for a few minutes when your supervisor and God goes into a meeting. Upon receiving prayers from Aaron and Sofie, you accidentally tag them as channels of universal destiny and tragic hilarity ensues.
As the game’s developer and designer, my role was:
- Designing branching narrative structure
- Writing dialogue and narration
- Implementing game logic and dialogue
- Testing and debugging
- Working closely with artists to ensure art style matched with story vision
Notes on design:
The story is divided into two major plots, with a total of six unique endings. Once the player has chosen the initial plot, that plot may branch in several different directions. Every ending leads to an epilogue that allows the player to play through again. Dialogue was tracked in spreadsheet format, linked to the speaker and the choice branch. The below excerpt is from the Prologue chapter.
Below is the narrative structure of the Next Few Minutes. With each choice, the player enters a branch that changes the story they get to see. Although some forks eventually re-intersect, the design of story events as modular building blocks give this experience a lot of replayability. This approach also plays with ideas of fate and determinism in the form of world events.
For implementation, each story event was given its own block of Ren’Py code. Most story events culminate in a choice, or an ending. This modular approach allowed me to track cause and effect among events more efficiently.
