About Chronautical
In this narrative-driven, sci-fi romance, investigate across space and time to uncover clues and unravel the secrets of a star system that has disappeared.
Chronautical is built around the idea of moving forward and backwards through time to solve a narrative mystery, talking and interacting with people to see how they change in time due to your actions. All the while you continue to fall in love with the mysterious stranger who saved your life and discover the secrets of time travel by piecing together the Great Machine, previously known only in myths. Visit the different planets and time periods in whatever order you decide to create unique experiences from player to player.
D4RL1N6, a robot assistant from the stories climax
a sketch of the same robot but more worn down, who you technically meet first.
Working on a time travel game
I worked on Chronautical as lead narrative designer for the first half of its development cycle. This means a lot of my work was structural and worldbuilding tasks. Unfortunately, Chronautical is a game about cause and effect smashing into each other, which as a writer, makes my job incredibly difficult. Not to mention, due to the nature of the two protagonists' relationship as lovers who meet each other in reverse time-line order, it meant writing a lot of the outlines in reverse order as well. To maintain consistency when building the narrative of each of the game’s Acts, I established three core elements that I would use as a backbone for all the work I did.
Non-linearity
Creating characters who you have already met before, but may not recognize now.
Creating a story that ties into itself in ways that surprise and delight the player.
Events unfold in a way that to a normal person might seem ordinary, but to a time traveler might seem confounding.
Drastic Change over time
Making sure that settings and characters change drastically when the player initiates time travel. Same streets. Wildly different context. Ex.
Time 1: A starving democracy on the leash of organized crime. People are too worn down to commit to any sort of radical change. Plant life is dying, but there is still hope for an ecosystem.
Time 2: The same city as before but overthrown by fascism and on the brink of planetary destruction due to environmental harvesting. Cities have collapsed into the planets core.
Recognizability
Though characters and environments should feel distinct and new, players should be able to recognize places and people they know, even if its not made clear at first.
Collaborative Worldbuilding
The story of Chronautical was born out of the short stories and miscellaneous musings of the game’s lead artist, writer and vision holder, Aeris Meadows. When initially starting work on the game I was given a bunch of materials to sort through and was responsible for organizing them to create a central structure for the game to revolve around. Through lots of worldbuilding meetings, documents we formed a vision of a galaxy spanning civilization that is slowly rusting.
My greatest challenge was finding a way to reinforce the massive scale of the setting while keeping the stories small and approachable. One of my solutions was making the planets of Chronautical very small. Each planet doesn’t have more than a few cities on it for the player to explore, which allowed me to match the scale of planetary politics and time travel conspiracies to the small scope of our development cycle.
A sketch of the “small planet” style for Chapter 1’s home world of Ichormourne.