Written In Blood
Dec 2023 - April 2024
what did i do??
my role: narrative designer/writer
my teammates and i split plot direction and writing equally. we would often do collaborative brainstorming/writing sessions where we decided:
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plot outline/direction
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character motivations, arcs, and details
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level objectives
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gameplay mechanics/elements
after designing a pass of the narrative, we would then present it to other students, get feedback, and iterate!
designing the narrative as a group initially caused some friction, especially over plot direction, but we discovered that by compromising together, we could find the best elements of each of our ideas and merge them together. this often made the overall story much better and more unique. it also helped each of us to be satisfied with the end result!
new things i learnt!
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scriptwriting
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we were instructed to write out a cutscene sequence and then voice act over it. this taught me proper formatting for dialogue scriptwriting.
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interactive narrative
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often times we brainstormed narrative moments that turned out to not be interactive at all and would only work as cutscenes! this was obviously an issue, so we found you really have to be creative and make plot progression moments interactive and engaging for players with both gameplay and narrative in-tandem.
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writing compelling characters
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we wanted a flawed protagonist that continued to make "wrong" choices, eventually leading him to an unsavory ending. however, we found that with each wrong choice, he was becoming more unlikeable. we knew this would make players feel distant from him; which isn't what we wanted until closer to the ending of the game.
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to fix this, we changed his "wrong" choices to be more morally grey/difficult questions for anyone to make. after making this change, we found him to feel more human and his actions made more sense within the plot, but it also made his descent into this dark end much more tragic.
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takeaways/post-mortem!
overall i am happy with how this story turned out and all the great work my teammates put in to create it with me. the strongest points in my opinion are that we were able to mostly keep our original themes/vision while also creating some interesting worldbuilding. the story ended up with a sort of witch/pirate theme mixed with eldritch dark-fantasy. this is a combo i havent seen in too many games so it made our project feel unique.
i do believe in some ways we failed at making the consequences to our protagonist's actions seem fair. he makes many rational choices to save his homeland and the people he cared for and yet still, he suffers in the end as a consequence. this isn't necessarily a negative as i still believe it works thematically, it just makes the story more of a tragedy than we had originally intended.
i also believe the story could have had much stronger character development outside of our protagonist. many of the side characters are quite under-developed and seem more like obstacles in the journey rather than real people.
