Approach
Spatial triggers detect a player or an interactable object.
Encoded Space
Castle narrative prototype
A short first-person game where rooms, clue objects, dialogue, and choices gradually expose a family story.
Exploring family history within the castle.
The story prototype draws on Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, retaining its uneasy domestic atmosphere and questions surrounding the family’s past.
The team distributed the family’s history across rooms and clue objects for players to discover. Reading, collecting, dialogue, and choices reveal the story and give players reasons to revisit rooms with new information.
Interaction systems for exploration, dialogue, and choice.
Dispatch
Story controllers call dialogue, reading, pickup, choice, or minigame events.
Respond
UI states pause, reveal, or redirect the player's next action.
Persist
Session and world state record clues, choices, and level progress.
Character encounters
Approaching a character triggers dialogue, with the dialogue manager loading the relevant content.
Evidence inspection
Books, notes, and clue objects open dedicated reading states without leaving the scene.
Branching response
Selected answers are recorded as story state for subsequent events to reference.
Pickup and memory
Collectable items connect object interaction with persistent session data.
Embedded actions
Players complete short interactive tasks during exploration to advance local story events.
Loading and pause
Menu, loading, pause, and confirmation interfaces support transitions between gameplay states.
Small games and hidden routes carry the story forward.
Short minigames connect story events, while hidden routes within the castle invite further exploration.
The sugar-bowl episode: a music-and-rhythm minigame.
This minigame draws on the novel’s sugar-bowl poisoning: Merricat puts arsenic in the sugar, killing several family members, and her sister Constance is acquitted after standing trial. The game omits Uncle Julian to simplify the narrative and adapts the sugar-bowl episode into a music-and-rhythm interaction that connects and advances story events.
Finding a shared frequency.
The second minigame uses song within the sisters’ relationship as the basis for a shared-frequency task. It is the team’s interactive adaptation of that relationship.
In the novel, village children taunt Merricat with a rhyme about the poisoning, associating song with hostility toward the sisters. The game uses the shared-frequency task to express a connection between them and advance the story through sound.
Exploring a hidden passage.
A passage is concealed within the castle’s domestic spaces. Players need to explore carefully, find its entrance, and pass through to continue. Finding the route is part of progressing through the story.
Objects and clues found in the rooms gradually reveal the family’s past.
The interface separates exploration, reading, and decision-making.
The interaction interface and its visual states preserve the dark printed aesthetic while making very different actions, such as reading a clue and choosing a response, immediately distinguishable.
Asset selection, preparation, and scene integration.
The main-use library contains 60 GLB files. Their retained metadata identifies 57 as Tripo/VAST AIGC outputs and three as Blender exports. Production involved generating objects, then selecting, naming, cleaning, combining, and placing them in scenes.
Generate
Create candidate props and furniture with Tripo3D.
Curate
Sort assets by room, clue function, and production priority.
Prepare
Clean and combine selected objects through Blender exports.
Integrate
Import, light, collide, and connect assets to Godot interactions.
Technical architecture and prototype implementation.
Planned architecture
The Godot report proposes modular levels, reusable interaction templates, signals, clue systems, and a kitchen-first production sequence.
Implemented prototype
The project includes scripts for session and world state, story controllers, dialogue, doors, pickups, readable objects, choices, video triggers, and minigame interactions.
