Narrative Design

During my bachelors program me and a couple of other students banded together to create a “Walking Sim”, a first person perspective walking game where the story takes the main focus. For this project I was narrative designer responsible for writing and adding dialogue, flavour text and other narrative elements.

As a team we would sit down and brainstorm some story ideas. What means the most to us, are there any story ideas we relate to or feel strongly about? Are there topics we wish to explore?

And as any creative projects goes, we start by brainstorming some ideas, doodling and sketching some rough ideas of what we want to have in the game, and what we want the game to be about. During this time we started to weed out ideas we felt were too hard to accomplish, or things we knew we wouldn’t have the time to complete.

We came to the conclusion that we wanted to have the game be a walking sim, where the player walks around talking to npcs. This way we could have the focus in the game be the story, and have certain elements like picking up items and reading them be the secondary mechanic. We created some milestones based on the goals we wanted to achieve by certain dates, and made sure that each morning before we started development we would all huddle up and talk about the day prior, what we accomplished, and about what we are working that day and if we need any help. 

During development I made character dialogue and item descriptions, our game was based around a smalltown with mainly the focus being on pollution and corruption.

So as such we created dialogue for characters that would either hint at the bigger picture, or be characters affected by said pollution in one way or another.

For the duration of this project I learned a lot about writing narrative content and dialogue as this was my main focus. Creating interesting dialogue that was both fun to read and created the personality of the different characters was a blast to work on.

Playable build here.