Narrative Design
Below are some of the projects I've been working on, from the more recent to earlier works, chronologically. Click the titles of projects below to go to their websites!
Fhaesir's Pride
2021 - Ongoing
Marmortal is a First Person Shooter and Platformer game made in Unity that focuses on a plethora of platforming puzzles and high-speed combat with tight and satisfying controls. The game won 2nd place award in the nationwide game-development competition Bit1 in 2021. The Unity demo is complete, and an expansion of the concept in Unreal 5 is in development right now.
The linked itch.io page might be restricted due to publicity reasons, but you can ask me for a link to the latest build!
I work on multiple aspects of Marmortal; however, one of my two major roles is in its narrative design, during which I collaborate with the rest of the Narrative Team to plot out a world for the game to take place in, a hero's journey for the main character to play through, thematise the levels according to the beats in the story, and make sure there are no noticeable inconsistencies throughout the game in storytelling due to any design decisions in gameplay or any slip-ups in displayed lore.
Words Left Unsaid
2020 - 2021
Words Left Unsaid is a noir mystery game made in Unity about a detective, an author, and a haunted hotel based around gathering clues of events that have happened in before and putting together the correct order in which they have happened.
Contains Flashing lights.
Like in Marmortal, I have had two major roles in the preparation of WLU, one of which being narrative design. For this, along with one other person, I've written part of the script for the game, as well as voice-acted one of the characters.
CRSG is a serious game about learning code review with science-fiction / exploration themes in it. It aims to teach its players the fundamentals of code review with multiple gamified examples. The current version of the app requires basic working knowledge of coding in Java. The project was written with Javascript and dressed with HTML and CSS.
This game was released as a tool paper on FSE 2020.
I have had multiple roles in this project, in its gamified parts and otherwise. The narrative aspect of it was written solely by me in an effort to create a story behind the exercises the players could follow, to give them a motivation to play the game besides just learning code review.
Major Game Jam Games
2019-2020
Rebuild Echo was made in GGJ 2020 under the theme of "repair", a 2D platformer about a mechanic in a post-apocalyptic world who finds a barely working robotic head in a junkyard. The robotic head, called Echo, talks to the mechanic in broken whispers and a poem, urging the mechanic to go to the 4 towers of old that hold the rest of its body. It is built in Godot 2.
Homeward was made in GGJ 2019 under the theme of "home", a light-hearted, top down 2.5D bullet hell shooter about a grumpy old man who just wants to rest, when his entire house is stolen from under him by aliens! The man has no chance but to find aliens, invade their ship, and get his house back! It is built in Unity.
In both Rebuild Echo and Homeward, the entire team was almost fully made of programmers, so in the spirit of Jamming, I partially handled multiple roles, as had the rest of the team. In both games, I came up with the stories/synopses for the games, as well as write whatever small piece of story there would be in the them.
The Astareum
2017-Ongoing
The Astareum is an expanding lore manuscript about a bronzepunk world called Astarea by the people of the modern Empire of Ebon, one of the biggest and oldest surviving civilisations that populate the planet: It includes perspectives and information about geography, climates, races sentient and otherwise, languages, cultures, populations and history. The manuscript and its upcoming new versions are built on Homebrewery.
Astarea is a world I started building around 2010, and have continuously added onto throughout the years as I wrote short stories and poems about it, and run games of it in various TTRPG systems. In 2017, I decided to make a compendium of the lore that had been building up in an effort to help my players involve themselves in the world better. Now I'm remaking the manuscript I made in 2017 to make it more readable, include new information, and to make the project fully public for the world.