Projects
The Glitch Witch
Lead Narrative/Quest Designer
[Unreal Engine 5] [Itch Demo]
Using Miro to build flowcharts, I created a collection of 7 multi-stage questlines for the player to embark on as Rosette, a curious young girl struggling to choose between her passion for engineering and acceptance from her post-apocalyptic village. Our core pillars were friendship, passion, and acceptance, so much of the narrative revolves around Rosette following her passion in STEM and having challenging conversations with her community about their preexisting biases that are holding her and their town back. Ultimately, friendship and love triumphs over all.
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Not only did I work closely with stakeholders to create an immersive world, but I also created 7 unique NPCs to bring the world to life. Each had a character bible in Notion with personality traits, quest steps, associated puzzle items, and other important information for the team to reference at a glance. I was also responsible for writing branching dialogue, UI text, and puzzle barks, adding up to over 800 lines of text throughout the entire game.
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Bloompunk
Narrative Designer
[Unity] [Steam Full Release]
Telling a comprehensive story in a fast-paced action-packed FPS without slowing down the players momentum can be tricky. My solution was a series of images flashed to the player in between levels (where the momentum was slowest). These images, dubbed "memories," displayed the backstory of the protagonist and the events that led up to the game. Said storyline is rooted (pun intended) in finding a balance between two things: technology and nature. Neither is "evil" in their own right, but allowing one to overwhelm the other leads to chaos. The player must constantly balance their loadout during gameplay, reflecting our narrative themes.
As I was the one who pitched the concept, I owned its further development from concept to final release. This included establishing the storyline, worldbuilding, writing the memories' contents, helping with their storyboard, and assisting with implementation in-engine. Most of my responsibilities outside of developing the Memories and worldbuilding was keeping our documentation up to date. This included our Game Design Document, our Macro, and our Narrative Bible.
Snapshots of Last Summer
Lead Narrative/Game Designer
[Unity]
The I owned gameplay and narrative design from concept to release. The player arrives to the small town of Riverwood as Harper, a college student coming home for winter break. They quickly discover that their old friend group is no longer, sending Harper on a bittersweet journey down memory lane to figure out what happened. Tackling themes like coming of age and fizzling friendships, I wanted to drip-feed information to keep a sense of mystery and discovery, allowing the player to slowly put things together--mirroring Harper's narrative arc and enhancing player immersion.
I wrote a total of 459 lines of dialogue across 4 young adult characters, which includes a variety of dialogue choices for the player to make. The Polaroid matching mechanic was my idea, as I wanted to cut the story into bite-sized scenes scattered throughout the map. This forced the player to explore the map and hear what happened from each character's unique perspective. Much of the implementation into Unity was also my responsibility, including lines of dialogue using Yarnspinner, movement of the characters during cutscenes, cutscene triggers and all of the level design/worldbuilding.
Pack
Lead Narrative Designer
[Unreal Engine 5]
As one of the first people on the project beside the creative director, I pitched, designed, and wrote 95% of narrative aspects from concept through implementation. This included research, character development, high level story arcs, in-game dialogue triggers, voice over, implementation in Unity, and worldbuilding. Pack is an intimate, authentic story about the beauty of imperfection and connecting with others against the odds. The player has to utilize the characters' unique strengths and weaknesses to survive the wilderness: Reese is the only one who can climb and Esther has opposable thumbs, thus forcing the two to work together to solve puzzles.
I worked bi-weekly with the design team to integrate character beats into our environmental puzzles and mechanics, ensuring immersive storytelling and emphasizing the emotional goals through every level of the player experience. I attended, directed, and monitored voice-over recording sessions alongside our sound designer and voice actress to ensure narrative vision and cohesion. I owned implementing these voice-over lines and worked with our sound designers to design a system to support the audio alongside subtitles.
Keep Me Posted
Narrative Designer
[Unity] [Steam Full Release]
I owned an NPC called The Well Family from conception to release. The quest is a lighthearted departure from combat, telling the story of a family that falls down a well, a new family member falling down the well each day. Each of the 5 characters in the quest has their own distinct personality and text color to make it clear which one is talking from the well to the Postman. Each interaction with the Well has about 40 lines of dialogue, adding up to 157 lines total over the course of the quest.
To communicate with engineering, design, and my narrative design lead, I crafted an easy-to-read character bible for The Well Family that outlined their characteristics. The document outlines each step of the quest and what exactly changed day-by-day for the player.
I not only edited and revised my own dialogue, but I ensured proper grammar, notation, punctuation, and legibility in all scripts implemented into the final game.
Black (W)hole
Lead Narrative/Game Designer
[Unity]
I was in charge of designing everything front-end and player-facing, which included level design of the 3D segments, game design, and narrative design. I developed two different characters for players to romance, each with a character profile for ease of reference. On the production side, I also assisted in putting together a GDD, a Press Kit, and keeping track of Unity Store asset purchases.
As a firm believer that dating sims are only as good as their love interests, I spent a lot of time defining how a black hole would act and worldbuilding based off of that. I then brought in inspiration from classic dating sim personality archetypes. I landed on Centauri being a little softer and human-like with Cygnus as the total opposite: a butch hiker who loves supernovas. Both Cygnus and Centauri had unique branching dialogue sequences adding up to about 320 lines.
Since I understood the world lore and character personalities best, I owned construction of the 3D level and determining the objective list in accordance to the character's likes/dislikes, implementing all of the above using proprietary tools developed by my co-developer.
Hedge Hug
Game Writer
[Unity] [Itch Full Release]
I came on late as a writer/screenwriter, so the 3 acts and beats were already laid out for me to work with in a macro. It was my job to breathe life into those beats with text that would appear in the final game. I started in Google Docs for iteration and polishing and put the final dialogue into a spreadsheet for ease of implementation. This added up to about 101 lines of dialogue between Emma and her best friend Laura throughout the game, plus the back and forth comments from the art critics.
Critics made comments on Emma's work, either positive or negative barks to reassure Emma or fuel her anxieties. I spent way more time on r/Pottery than I'd like to admit gathering accurate critiques and compliments. I ended up writing about 115 comments/barks total for Hedge Hug, plus additional barks for Emma's journal puzzles.
