What I'm currently working on :
Creating the playable characters
Designing the quests
Since our game is multiplayer, the narrative has to be light and fluid so that the information is understood.
One of the ways we express the narrative is through the characters themselves. They need to have very distinct personalities, bringing life into the drill through their voice (like the barks), graphics and gameplay features.
The characters’ personalities are translated into game mechanics. Writing the characters helps me to design the game mechanics, linking narrative and gameplay as closely as possible.
As the game unfolds through missions, we pay particular attention to them. My aim is to create interesting missions to which procedural variations can be applied.
Quests are our main way of telling the story, but our players’ attention is very limited. The idea is therefore to limit dialogue and focus on gameplay. To achieve this, I’m working on procedural narrative event systems.
Because there are several of us creating the quests, I’m also in charge of the narrative coherence.
I’m also creating small tools and documents to enhance our collaboration. For instance, I developed this narrative timeline to assist us in designing quests by placing them within a narrative chapter and standardizing the types of quests with key themes (“parameters”).
The chapters and content are still WIP; this is just an illustration of the timeline’s structure and functionality.