Narrative Design
Bugnauts!
Genres: Action-Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy, Family Friendly, Educational
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In Bugnauts, players take on the role of Chloe, a young entomologist determined to save her island home from the giant Phantom bugs wreaking havoc across its shores. Armed with her trusty net, swing, jump, and battle your way through hordes of magically corrupted insects in this fast-paced 3D projectile action game! ​​
As the Lead Writer & Narrative Designer on this game, I had a couple different goals.
Firstly, to write a humorous and compelling action-adventure story for all ages, one that would mesh perfectly with the gameplay.
Secondly, to give the player chances to learn more about cool bugs, and how important native species are for their ecosystems.
Thirdly, to bring awareness to the impact that modern day colonization continues to have on islander communities. Particularly the environmental damage.​
I did quite a lot of research for this game.
I read up on each of the different types of bugs showcased, before writing the in-character educational Field Guide entrees, plus combat tips in the voice of the protagonist.
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I also did a lot of research into how the US, and especially its tourism industry, has been decimating Hawai'i, (making sure to read a lot of sources from kanaka maoli.)
I looked into colonial impacts on other islands too, such as Puerto Rico, Guam and more. After all, we wanted to make sure that the island in Bugnuts is its own unique island, not a stand-in for any one real world location.​
In terms of the dialogue system, I first implemented the script into Articy:Draft, to ease the process of implementing the dialogue into Unreal Engine.
This not only made it a more smooth process in terms of connecting scenes to locations, but Articy:Draft's sprite features showed the UI engineer which character expression sprites to put for each line.
While Bugnauts is fairly linear, it does contain a handful of "collectible" bugs for those with particularly sharp eyes to discover.
I am the one who decided where each of these would be located, and then comminated this to art, design, and engineering to implement.
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I am really glad that I took the extra step to come up with some one-time special props for this, as it resulted in what players would point to a some of their favorite parts of the map.
Idea
Result
Lastly, I helped to choose our voice actors, and direct the voice acting cast! I actually had been the temp voice actor for the protagonist, and it was expectedly terrible hahaha.
Hans
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Genres: Science Fiction, Historical, Dark Comedy​
Hans is a visual novel baking simulator in which you play as an alien dropped off on Earth during World War 1, who bakes magical pastries to help the people in your small town. You can also choose not to make what they ask for, because sometimes their requests are not as thought out as they may think.
Just be prepared, because your actions have eight endings worth of consequences!
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I had three primary goals for the narrative of this game, that the majority of gameplay and dialogue decisions would come down to:
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1. Narrative is at the core of all gameplay.
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2. Player's baking outcomes are what impact the plot.
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3. The characters are interesting: Each is charming, and we root for them, but they are all flawed in their own ways.
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I made a point to write a variety of tones into this game. With eight possible endings, player choice can lead to it being mostly goofy and light hearted, bittersweet and serious, or downright depressing.
Looking back, I think that I could have done a better of a job with mixing such different tones (and it is something that I have since improved at), but I still do stand by my assertion that tone variety is a great way to keep players on their toes.
That tone variety is a big part of what can make branching narrative games fun not only to play, but to compare with other people's experiences as well.
Werelock Holmes
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Genres: Mystery, Satire, Drama-Comedy, Action
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Werelock Holmes is a visual novel in which you solve an exotic bird related murder mystery with the unique gay werewolf re-imagination of the classic crime solving duo!
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The prompt for this month-long project was to adapt a public domain story.
I ended up adapting two at once because I thought a werewolf Sherlock Holmes sounded like a fresh and interesting version of his drug addiction, and would help to separate it from the countless Sherlock Holmes adaptations out there.
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I've grown up such a fan of classic murder mysteries, but this was the first time I really got to write my own.
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I don't normally written via genre conventions due to my love of multi-genre media, but I will admit that working within a genre made structuring this plot significantly easier than if the story were something more experimental.​​​
It was very key to this game that players not be able to correctly guess who the killer was, but for them still to believe afterwards that it makes sense who the killer turned out to be.​
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​I had the protagonists focus on two core suspects who are character foils of each other, making sure that each got the same amount of attention and lacked provable alibis. While many players had a feeling that there must be some sort of trick behind this (for example, one thought that maybe these two characters secretly worked together to both commit the murder), none guessed correctly.
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I made sure to thoroughly introduce the real killer along with some suspicious dialogue in advance before the big reveal. I believe that I got away with it is because the focus when providing all that information was never actually on him, it was on using him as a tool to further flesh out the main characters.
As I first and foremost considered this game to be a chance to showcase my writing abilities, the design of the game itself very much revolved around that.
Because of this, and the fact that I only had a month to make such a long game, it is an incredibly linear experience. That being said, I still did my best to allow for player decision making whenever possible, and would incentivize this in part by concealing unexpected and particularly intriguing information behind different dialogue paths.
Ren.py's primary affordance as a visual novel development software is that it's very easy to create branching pathways, so although this story itself only has one ending, I utilized this to really try to make the player feel like a detective. (And not just any detective, but Sherlock's apprentice.)
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Whenever I was able, I let the player state what they thought was truly going on, and what they wanted to investigate in which order.
