#sanity system

A small thing, but it took 9 weeks to build:

The sanity system in Maximilien isn’t a simple “madness meter.” It represents the character’s overall mental state, and the lower it gets, the more directly it starts interfering with the experience of the interactive novel itself.

Visual artifacts begin to appear — subtle at first, then increasingly intrusive depending on the severity of the character’s condition. But the text is affected too.

Sentences can distort, fragment, repeat themselves, blur intentions, or become harder to interpret reliably. Not in a random way, but in a way tied to the character’s actual psychological state. The goal wasn’t to make the prose “glitchy,” but to make perception itself feel unstable.

In this example, the character has been drinking heavily, and the narration becomes altered accordingly. Certain words slip. Thoughts lose precision. The text remains readable, but no longer entirely trustworthy.

Under the hood, the system uses sanity as a continuous narrative variable that dynamically influences which prose fragments are loaded during scenes. There are hundreds of alternate text variations written specifically for these states — not just darker rewrites, but fundamentally different interpretations of the same moment.

Writing them was probably harder than building the system itself. Each altered passage had to feel psychologically coherent, emotionally believable, and still narratively functional.

One of my favorite moments during testing was when someone replayed a scene and became convinced parts of it had “always been there,” even though they were seeing completely different prose variations. That confusion — that uncertainty about memory — was exactly the effect I wanted.

— Yohan