Interstellar QuARANTINE

Interstellar Quarantine was a project completed for an interactive storytelling class.

The story takes place on a generation ship in transit between Sol and Alpha Centauri. Before the ship left Earth, experts of every sort were placed into cryo-sleep that they may put their skills to use upon arrival at their new home. On the rotating ring of the ship, another group of travelers stayed awake. These were the ship’s crew, a larger population that would live and die upon the ship, maintaining the massive construction to ensure its safe arrival. But along the way, a mysterious sickness arose among the walkers of the ring. With no contagious disease experts among the crew, they had to turn to the sleepers to find help. This is where you come in. As an expert in contagions, you are tasked with researching and curing the disease before it spreads and kills everyone on board, dooming the mission. But it won’t be easy. A megalomaniacal captain and an ignorant crew stand in your way.

Will you be able to stop the spread? Or is humanity’s first foray into the stars doomed to fail?

Click here to find out!

This is another game that was designed and written in the course of about a week, and it definitely shows in some ways, but I also feel like it has some strengths you may not expect from a game made in such a short amount of time.

As a serious game teaching about infectious diseases, the game may be a bit heavy-handed, but most play-testers responded positively to the educational aspects of the game. It would probably be good to include more information about how each of the mitigation techniques actually work in order to improve the learning within the game.

There are multiple endings to the story based on player choices, though the feedback that leads you to each choice is not necessarily the best. If I were to revisit this project, my main focus would be on more visible feedback. There was a version of the game that had a feedback element, but it was quite buggy and I didn’t have time to fix it before publishing. The appearance of the bugged feedback was more confusing than useful, so I decided to remove it and offer less feedback as opposed to offering bad feedback to the player. The story also reads like a first draft in some instances (because it is), and that would be addressed as well. One of the more annoying aspects, in my opinion, is that some of the events repeat because I didn’t limit their occurrence in the random generator. For some reason, this makes the Captain seem overly fond of karaoke nights in some playthroughs.