Narrative Design
I am a firm believer that every game has a story to tell, and my design career has always revolved around bringing players into that story.
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skate.™ Narrative Systems
On skate. I was the Lead Narrative Designer, owning the design and implementation of Narrative Systems - including and especially our scripted voiceover systems.
In skate, there are two distinct VO Systems:
The Narrative Sequencer delivers scripted VO that is meant to be experienced in a traditional, linear/semi-linear way. It is "sequenced" into a flow that is effective for storytelling across different forms of gameplay content.
A separate proprietary tool delivers systemic World and gameplay VO. This includes all diegetic VO in the game including PA Systems, NPCs, and gameplay commentary from the player's "Virtual Assistant". Narrative Designers frequently collaborated with Speech Designers to add and adjust these sources - increasingly so as our Live Service progressed.
When I took on the role of Lead Designer, we were roughly a year out from Content Complete without a VO Pipeline. I worked closely with Engineers, UX, Localization and Audio Artists to design a system that interfaced with our intended VO Pipeline for both systems, and could be used within existing content creation tools with maximum flexibility.
Ultimately, we developed a VO Pipeline for both VO Systems that was flexible, robust, and scalable. This Pipeline and the systems that used it proved invaluable for delivering a polished and reactive VO experience for players.
In this video example, you can see the Narrative Sequencer's flexibility in playing tutorial dialogue, gameplay commentary, and cinematics. I was responsible for Narrative Design for this Mission (and most of the other 25+ Missions) including all dialogue, writing, narrative implementation including conditional VO, a portion of the Mission Design, and all text/naming.
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Marvel Champions Franchise Dialogue Systems
On Realm of Champions, I adapted our existing backend Dialogue Systems to work with our different genre and core loop from our original title Marvel Contest of Champions. On Contest, each “encounter” on a map could tell a unique story with dialogue. Realm focused on matchmade modes instead of dozens of handcrafted encounters, so a new approach was required.
Instead of in-game conversations, we created “Dialogue Slots” on each game mode on the server, and implemented new parameters on conversations that allowed us to tell expanding stories as players repeatedly played each mode without repeating conversations.
Additionally, since Realm’s core feature was full hero customization, I worked with our RPG team to integrate dynamic character generation and showcase our incredible armor sets through dialogue characters.
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Realm of Champions Codex
After the 1.0 Release of Realm of Champions, it became clear from player feedback that they wanted to know more about the world and discover it as they played. They also felt that the unique take on the Marvel Universe we had created had so much more to offer in-game.
To solve these problems and offer players a light element of discovery/completionism, I worked with our Engineering and UI teams to develop the Codex: Text/Image Panels that could be “Discovered” when certain modes and maps entered rotation and offering an expanded history of Battleworld. This encouraged players to log in and check out the new Codex Entries, and also enabled us to tell progressive stories via the codex and mode scheduling. I also wrote much of the content in these entries during my time on the project.