Concept
In this interactive short story, you take the role of a Communications Officer stationed in orbit around a colonized alien planet.
Your job is to relay messages between key characters in the colony and help coordinate their efforts to combat a mysterious outbreak.
A playable browser version of Transmission is available here.
Player experience
In Transmission, you step into the role of a Communications Officer stationed in orbit above a remote colony. Your primary responsibility is to relay messages between key characters on the surface.
You enter your name and get introduced to a fictional computer interface that you must navigate to explore the story.
While the narrative follows a largely deterministic path, the interface creates a sense of autonomy and exploration.
Characters of Transmission
What makes a good character? Well, what makes good art?
Good art makes us feel something. That’s its true purpose. In games, as in all art, we use a range of components to build emotion: aesthetics, story, audio, mechanics, rewards, etc.. Characters, I would argue, is a component of its own.
Characters tap into something primal. Through evolution, we’ve learned to read people instinctively. We’re wired to respond emotionally to a person’s expression. Their appearance, tone and body language can trigger feelings of trust, fear, empathy, suspicion or affection.
Badly designed characters, however, do not reach us in that way. Or worse, they trigger responses that interfere with the game’s intention.
The characters of Transmission make up, without a doubt, the most important component of the game.
Commander William Lee
It’s important that we work together to keep things under control.
The long-serving leader of the colony. William Lee helped build it from the ground up. He’s experienced, pragmatic, and unwavering in his loyalty to the mission: To maintain order.
He doesn’t concern himself with why the colony exists, only that it continues to do so.
Purpose
Lee is the player’s first point of contact and in many ways he represents the colony itself. Initially, he’s a voice of order and authority, calm and capable. As conditions worsen, he becomes more emotional and less composed. The system he represents is collapsing.
Dr. Kayla Endale
I’m really worried about everyone’s safety here.
The colony’s Chief Medical Officer. Kayla Endale is deeply committed to protecting her patients. She’s honest, unafraid to challenge authority, and willing to take bold action when lives are on the line.
She's an excellent doctor who is passionate about her work and will stop at nothing to save her patients.
Purpose
Kayla drives the urgency of the game. As the situation worsens, she becomes the conscience of the narrative. Her honesty adds weight to the story. In many ways, she represents the colony’s mother.
Dr. Alejandro Mendoza
Didn’t I tell you I’m busy?
A brilliant xenobiologist with decades of experience. Dr. Mendoza was brought to the colony to study the native microbiota. He’s cynical and long past the age of idealism. His loyalty is to his work, not people.
He often dismisses others, certain that he’s the smartest person in the room, and most of the time he’s right.
Purpose
Mendoza’s actions are questionable, but he’s also deeply human and relatable as he’s fallen victim to corporate forces. Through him, the player experiences ethical complexity and ambiguity.
Mr. Jonathan Cross
The safety and well-being of our employees remains our top priority.
A high-level executive at Mnemosyne Enterprises Inc., the corporation funding the colony. Mr. Cross is polished, articulate, and always in control. He operates from a safe distance on Earth.
Purpose
Cross represents power, corporate indifference and the insatiable hunger for profit. He rarely lies but always speaks in half-truths, often accompanied by company values.
He is unavailable through most of the game, appearing only when there’s something to gain. Through him, the player experiences lack of control and the confrontation of antagonistic forces.
Narrative structure
Good art makes us feel something. Great art creates an experience. For a story to truly resonate, it must feel complete. It needs to satisfy. Structure is how we create that sense of wholeness.
Structure can also generate emotional momentum by guiding the player’s expectations, building tension, and making the eventual release of that tension more impactful.
The Three Acts of Transmission
Transmission unfolds across three micro-acts, each shifting the pacing and the players objective in order to build momentum.
Act I (Arrival)
The player settles into their role as Communications Officer, learning the computer system and establishing contact with key characters.
Act II (Escalation)
The crisis deepens. The first patient awakens in a frenzy, and urgency now drives the player’s objectives.
Act III (Revelation)
The final pieces of the puzzle are revealed. The player is pressured to act and thereby bringing the story to its conclusion.
Game systems
Progression System
I designed Transmission’s progression system to be a data-driven patching system built on Godot resources. Every element of the game, (characters, calls, files, messages, etc.), is represented by its own custom resource file.
These resources are updated (patched) at key events in the game, which drives the progression.
This system was designed to fully correspond to the structure of the following event graph that I had written for the game’s story progression.
User interface
I wanted the user interface to feel like a text-based command line interface and that would allow the player to navigate between the system’s pages and to initiate video calls.
I built the navigation system around Godot’s rich text features. At its core is a Page base class, that supports rendering of common text components such as titles and lines, but also navigation between pages and standard reaction to user input.
However, the base class is designed to be expandable and overridable, to make it easy to add specialized behavior for pages that require unique functionality.
The overall page hierarchy is represented by a node hierarchy in the editor scene tree, which allowed me to easily build and visualize the page structure.
Other than these, I also built systems regarding the game’s audio, scene handling, animations, shader effects, etc..
Art and visual style
A major part of the game’s visual style lies in it’s minimalistic text-based interface. But there are also sprites and animations that were were created with the help of generative AI.
Sprites were generated using ChatGPT, together with a pre-defined style guide (json) in order to preserve visual consistency.
Animations were created from a base sprite using Runway and then manually polished and made loopable in Premier Pro.
Finally, in-game shaders with CRT and VHS effects added a finishing touch.