Elyium

Elyium is an experimental mobile alternate reality game, and a platform for narrative experiences and storytelling.

To play, download the APK in this repository at /public/Elyium.apk and install it on your Android device. There also exists a desktop version of Elyium, which is mostly for debugging and general convenience. If you're interested, though, it's found under /desktop.

More information on this project can be found here.

NOTE: Elyium is playable. Remaining tasks to be completed are related to user experience / interaction design, some minor fixes, and testing. As of right now, the project is on hold indefinitely. It acts as a proof of concept, and would require a full rewrite for increased accessability and expandability.

Repository Contents

/data contains the assets and content for both the mobile and desktop versions of Elyium.

/parsing contains a small script that puts together individual entities into one single .json file.

/public contains all public data, including a guide to writing for Elyium, as well as the APK file for Android installations.

/desktop contains the code for the desktop version of Elyium, made for debugging and general convenience, rather than actual gameplay.

/mobile contains the code for the mobile version.

In terms of differences between the mobile and desktop version, the mobile version supports location tracking, a fundemental feature for the storytelling format of Elyium, so this is the suggested gameplay platform, by far. Your location in the desktop version is determined through WASD input, much more boring. Also, due to screen sizing and pixel density, the two versions wear slightly different UIs, with the mobile version being once again the intended visual experience.

What is Elyium?

Put very simply: Elyium is a narrative game where the player walks around with their phone, and using the player's GPS coordinates, they come accross different entities (people, locations, objects). These entities have various stories attached to them, and the player, upon encountering an entity, is presented with one of these stories. Each story has choices the player must make, producing a banching storyline structure. Additionally, some of the entities' stories can be 'conditional', meaning that they are only presented if another story (or another set of stories) have been completed in a specific way, which allows for stories to be interconnected between entities, and for there to exist 'questlines' of sorts. The entities a player has encountered (along with their real-world coordinates) are saved in the player's database, allowing the player to revisit old entities and find new experiences.

Put in nice, fancy words: Elyium is an experimental, mobile alternate reality game, and narrative platform. It is a limbo world that exists in the void between other realms, and is composed of multiple entities that each posess their own branching stories, often intertwining with one another's narratives. These entities are encountered through the exploration of the physical realm, with the phone, the artifact, acting as a conduit to Elyium's infinite planes. Each new encounter saves the entity's location in a database, allowing revisitations of old entities for new experiences.

Aside from being a story-centered game, Elyium is also a storytelling format. The experience described above works regardless of the content of each entity's branching stories, meaning that anyone can create content for their own instance of Elyium. All content (entities, the image associated to them, their stories, each story's choices, the ties between different stories, and custom real-world locations for entities) is written within a few .json files, making writing for this format relatively user friendly. (I am working on creating a web client that would make this writing as convenient as possible.)

Why did you make Elyium?

The reason I made Elyium is primarily to explore narrative as a concept, and to learn more about stories and world-building through the process of designing a narrative-centric experience. I wanted to create a format of storytelling unique to the alternate reality capacity of mobile devices and location tracking, and allow others to create their own content for this format, too. This project was an oportunity for me to produce and learn about narratives that interest me, as well as a way for me to experiment with narrative design and unusual storytelling formats.

How does Elyium work?

An array of pre-written entities are (more or less) randomly spawned (unless they have a custom location written into them) at the player's location as the player navigates the physical realm. Each entity has a set of conflicts (which can be conditional, only presented to players once other conflicts (from either the same entity or others) have been resolved in specific ways), and each conflict has a set of choices that the player can make in order to resolve it. Choices either lead to a resolution, ending the conflict and letting the player continue roaming the world again, or they lead to another conflict, creating a chain of events that can technically last as long as the narrator wishes.

When a player first encounters an entity, they are forced into a narrative sequence. After they've completed this sequence, this entity is saved in their database (accessible through the small square on the bottom right). In this database view, they can see their current real-world coordinates, as well as all the entities they've encountered and their respective coordinates. If a player is close enough to a previously encountered entity, they simply need click/tap the entity in the database view to interact with it again and be presented with a new narrative sequence (if the entity in question has one available).

How do I write stories on Elyium?

All entities are written in a .json format. Due to the parsing system being quite 'hard', it is (unfortunately) important that writers stick to the appropriate format to avoid errors. A guide to writing for Elyium can be found in this repository, at /public/Guide to Writing.md. It explains how to format your stories, suggested tools that make writing more seamless, and instructions on how to build your own version of Elyium.

Plan

A breakdown of the remaining tasks to be completed for the complete production of this project, in (more or less) chronological order.

NOTE: Elyium is playable. Remaining tasks to be completed are related to user experience / interaction design, some minor fixes, and testing. As of right now, the project is on hold indefinitely. It acts as a proof of concept, and would require a full rewrite for increased accessability and expandability.

• Rewrite for web.

• Create writing application.

• Add scrolling/pages to menu interface.

• Change menu entity interface element to show it can be interacted with.

• Add visual hint that previously encountered entity now has more encounters.

• Add vibration feedback for UI presses and entity encounters.

• Use timer to keep players from continuously getting narratives in the same entity by persistently interacting with it.