Alter Ego is a 2D point-and-click narrative-based adventure game featuring psychological elements. Help Reese the rat uncover the mystery as to how the corpse of her partner ended up in her kitchen! Explore two levels with atmospheric environments, solve puzzles, and use the items in your inventory to uncover the mystery behind Reese and Winona’s relationship, and find the real culprit—if there is one.

Alter Ego is an exploration of an unhealthy romantic relationship. As a narrative designer, I used artistic tools such as animal character designs and effective cutscene compositions to make its messages more easily digestible.

Linked below is our free-to-play game.

The audience's first impression of Reese is the fact that she is accused of murdering Winona. Her character design features prisoner symbols, such as the choker, orange shirt, and ball-and-chain in order to make her role in the plot easy to identify.

However, her "prisoner" aesthetic serves another function, too: to foreshadow that she feels like a prisoner in her relationship with Winona!

The goal with Winona's sheep design was to portray a person who presents themself to the world as perfect: she is calm, she is collected, and most of all, she is innocent.

It isn't until the story of the game progresses that Winona changes face, showing her true colors as a toxic person. Or, a "wolf in sheep's clothing."

Winona the Wolf is everything Winona the Sheep hides from the world: her rage, desperation, and indignity. She gets angry when Reese fights back against her abuse, thus turning on Reese.

The cutscenes in Alter Ego were a collaborative effort. I'll discuss the choices I made when working from some of the storyboards in the third cutscene.

Because Erik did the hard work of laying down the beats and dialogue of each scene, my goal was to work from there to make an even more emotional experience for the player.

In this panel, I chose to emphasize Winona's anger at Reese for attacking her (defending herself), hence her clutching the wound at her side. I puffed up her dress, hair, and tail to make her figure bigger and more threatening, and made her vortex eyes the focal point of the shot. My goal with this drawing is to make the player feel just as threatened as Reese would in this moment, as a tiny rat looking up at a giant angry wolf.

I liked the note left about Reese backing up, so I wanted to ramp it up by havng a dynamic bird's eye view from Winona's shoulder to make Reese look even more cornered. I use the framing of the background, speech bubbles, and menacing edge effects to draw attention to Reese's reaching for her knife.

I took a dramatic departure from the original storyboard because I knew that a climactic minigame was coming right after this scene, where the player has to mash the mouse button repeatedly in order to win the struggle. So, I wanted to show a duel nearing commencement as a way to warn the player, "hey, you're about to fight!"

Again, I wanted to strike the tone as "the odds are stacked against the player," so I made Winona take up the majority of the screen as she frames Reese and Reese's tiny little knife. I also put Reese's left hand up as a gesture to show she's doing this out of self-defense, and not an intentional attack.