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 others, get feedback, and iterate!
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designing the narrative as a group initially caused some friction, especially over direction, but we discovered that compromising by finding the best elements of each of our ideas, and then merging them together made the story much stronger. it also helped each of us be happy with the end result!
new things i learnt!
proper formatting for dialogue scriptwriting: as we were instructed to write out a cutscene sequence and then voice act over it.
interactive narrative: often times we thought of narrative moments and they turned out to be not interactive at all and would only work as cutscenes; so, we found you really have to be creative and make plot progression moments interactive and engaging for players.
compelling main character: we wanted a flawed protagonist that continued to make "wrong" choices, eventually leading to an unsavory ending. however, we found that with these choices, he was becoming quite unlikeable, making players feel distant from him; which isn't what we wanted until closer to the ending. 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.
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 and we also created some interesting worldbuilding with a sort of witch/pirate vibe mixed with eldritch dark fantasy. this is a combo i really havent seen in too many games.
i do believe in a way we failed at making the consequences to Razvan's actions seem just, as in the plot, he made many rational choices to save his homeland and the people he cared for and yet still, he suffered as a consequence. this isn't necessarily a bad thing as i still believe it works, it just makes the story more of a tragedy than we had originally wanted/intended.
i also believe the story could have had much stronger character development outside of Razvan. many of the side characters are quite under-developed and seem more like obstacles in Razvan's journey rather than real people.
