Mechanics Of The Funnel

Two weeks ago we announced our studio’s debut game: The Funnel. If you have yet to see the announcement trailer, check it out here.

The trailer is just a sample of the many elements in the Funnel, but we wanted to take this chance to dive deeper into the mechanics you can expect from our narrative puzzle system.

DIALOGUE

At the heart of The Funnel is our dialogue system which I’m sure many of you will be familiar with as it mirrors many other branching dialogue systems. However, one thing that’s really important to us is making sure that every choice matters in some way. We’ve gone through multiple passes in our dialogue to make sure that every time you are offered a choice, you are either changing the course of your story or at the very least affecting an NPC’s overall opinion of you.

IMPLICIT CHOICE

To add on to this, the concept of implicit choices is an important pillar of The Funnel. Narrative events will not only be affected by the explicit dialogue choices you make, but also any actions you take and whether they line up with what you said you would do. One of our character’s might ask you to meet at night and explore an abandoned part of the factory. But, if you don’t show up that night or even meet them only to turn around and leave, they might feel abandoned by you and decide to go explore the factory on their own.

MINIGAMES

Another very important part of The Funnel’s choice structure is our minigames. Rather than having failures in a minigame result in a typical fail state and retry, our minigames treat success and failure as story paths. If you fail to unlock a door in time for example, it may lead to you being discovered and your factory being punished. There are no points in The Funnel where the game will ever ask you to reload.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this short exploration of the way choices operate in The Funnel. Keep an eye out next week for a dive into our central minigame: The Gear Assembly.