This post will show how the story is portrayed to the player.
Dialogue/Cutscenes
Much of the story is given to the player through cutscenes and dialogue with NPCs – these interactions will further develop the worldbuilding within Arcadia, provide NPCs with more personality and reveal more of the story to the player.
Cutscenes will be used to outline importance of events if an event has a cutscene that means its extremely important. Though these cutscenes may be somewhat cryptic and not apparent to the player, e.g: The introduction of ‘Father’ during the first death cutscene.
Some vital pieces of information are provided only by optional dialogue, e.g: the use of the ‘Rusty Key‘ to unlock the Prisoner’s cell.
Dialogue for the introduction of the game – and the ‘Rusty Key‘ -can be seen within the Twine Prototype of Arcadia in my GDD.
Item Descriptions
Some items within Arcadia with have very specific uses that aren’t outright told to the player, these specific uses can be hinted at through item descriptions. Some item descriptions will also have history and lore of certain items which can help the player piece together the history behind Arcadia.
For example, a ice weapon may have a description along the lines of ‘Forged by the giants of the North, it is able to inflict frost damage to foes.’