What it is
C’est la vie is a deckbuilding game set in Quebec in the 1980s-2010s, following the life of a single individual as they grow up, develop friends, loved ones, and life experiences, and forge a unique path all their own. The game uses the surreal absurdity of older generative AI models to adapt its art assets to the player’s choices. It was developed by Jonathan Lessard and LabLabLab at Concordia University.
What I did
I was a Narrative Designer for C’est la vie, working particularly in LabLabLab’s in-house narrative scripting tool, Blabbeur. My responsibilities were largely split between systems and narrative design priorities.
Systems Design
I designed a system to track the player’s employment status and produce appropriate narrative content based on this information. To do this, I worked closely with the Narrative Designer assigned to the game’s Education subsystem, ensuring that I was validating the choices and decision spaces that he had opened up.
My model for Employment was based on Emily Short’s concept of storylets: self-contained islands of narrative content that allow for significant branching within them while still constraining the possible macro-scale outputs. The player getting a job generates certain job-specific stresses and opportunities, markedly changing the player’s relationship to the sinks and faucets of the game’s resources while not completely branching the game’s narrative. Additionally, different career paths will affect player characters differently, based on their personality traits (established in childhood and adolescence) and education (generally, but not always, established before Employment).
Narrative Design
Working on this game involved a significant amount of writing, as the game provides feedback based on the player character’s personality whenever a card is played. For each card, I decided which of the player’s possible personality traits would have something unique to say about the card, and then wrote their responses in an appropriate voice. For example, a character who is Curious or Creative will chafe at a boring office job, while a Traditionalist character will voice their appreciation for stability and routine. In order to prevent the game from getting stale on multiple playthroughs, we used LabLabLab’s Blabbeur procedural text tool to define unique and characterful word pools. Writing these pools and consistently dropping one or two truly deranged options was my favourite part of the role, by far. The potential weirdness and discordance was part of our intended design aesthetic, mirroring the surreality of the generated art.
Where to play it
C’est la vie is available for download on LabLabLab’s itch.io page.
Stephen Friedrich - Game Designer 