Genre: Merchant Simulator / Boss Rush
Platform: PC
Engine: Unreal
Skills Used: Narrative Design, Writing
Team: John Salagaj, JohnWilliam "Dmitri" Kazanecki, Aaron Higgins, Tony Bennie, Dennis Ngo, Gabrielle Kenney, Riley Bufton, Dan Covert, AJ Purnell, Amanda Deep, Ben Hiller, and Jed Myers
A hybrid of a boss rush game and a merchant game.
Intent
The goal of this project was to unify a team's disparate game concepts into a singular experience. Half the team wanted to make a merchant game and the other half wanted to make a Boss Rush game. They were inspired to combine them into a story-based game about a semi-retired adventurer who went by the title of the Grand Master. The result was a game that combined them both in a cohesive way. My involvement was as a Narrative Designer and a Writer for the customers and for the main quest.
Platform: PC
Engine: Unreal
Skills Used: Narrative Design, Writing
Team: John Salagaj, JohnWilliam "Dmitri" Kazanecki, Aaron Higgins, Tony Bennie, Dennis Ngo, Gabrielle Kenney, Riley Bufton, Dan Covert, AJ Purnell, Amanda Deep, Ben Hiller, and Jed Myers
A hybrid of a boss rush game and a merchant game.
Intent
The goal of this project was to unify a team's disparate game concepts into a singular experience. Half the team wanted to make a merchant game and the other half wanted to make a Boss Rush game. They were inspired to combine them into a story-based game about a semi-retired adventurer who went by the title of the Grand Master. The result was a game that combined them both in a cohesive way. My involvement was as a Narrative Designer and a Writer for the customers and for the main quest.
Writing
When I arrived on the project, the narrative was largely undefined. We set about writing the interactions between customers and the Grand Master. Due to the fact that our dialogue was branched, we wrote it in a flowchart format that collapsed on itself in Mass Effect style conversation trees. The Grand Master's conversation choices would be arranged based on the archetypes of old man character. Our goal was to let the player feel like the old man character in a classic adventure story, but they got to choose the flavor.
When I arrived on the project, the narrative was largely undefined. We set about writing the interactions between customers and the Grand Master. Due to the fact that our dialogue was branched, we wrote it in a flowchart format that collapsed on itself in Mass Effect style conversation trees. The Grand Master's conversation choices would be arranged based on the archetypes of old man character. Our goal was to let the player feel like the old man character in a classic adventure story, but they got to choose the flavor.
The Big Rewrites
We designed the main arc around a boss fight between the Grand Master and a monster whose savagery put the Grand Master on the path to what he became. This boss was the crux of the game and in the final five weeks, we were told he was going to be cut and would be replaced by a boss fight between the Grand Master and two of the previous boss enemies. We completely rewrote the plot and came up with a new solution. We eventually created a new background for the Grand Master in which we created an explanation for the character's prowess: He had discovered that monsters were sapient in a traumatic event that cost the life of one of his friends..
In the final few weeks, a bombshell was dropped. Due to time constraints, branching dialogue trees were no longer possible, meaning that a massive amount of our dialogue had to be restructured and cut. Within a week we all had reformatted our dialogue. But this left us with a dilemma. Originally, the main character had a character-writing philosophy similar to Mass Effect's Commander Shepard. But the move to linear dialogue required us to create a specific, new character for him. We settled on a more laconic, wise old man who remains equally optimistic and skeptical.
Our final version, however, was even more reductionist. The Grand Master no longer speaks but instead is a silent protagonist (except for in the opening cutscene). In the end, The Grand Master became a much of an emergent story instead, with an instance based narrative with individual encounters making up most of it.
We designed the main arc around a boss fight between the Grand Master and a monster whose savagery put the Grand Master on the path to what he became. This boss was the crux of the game and in the final five weeks, we were told he was going to be cut and would be replaced by a boss fight between the Grand Master and two of the previous boss enemies. We completely rewrote the plot and came up with a new solution. We eventually created a new background for the Grand Master in which we created an explanation for the character's prowess: He had discovered that monsters were sapient in a traumatic event that cost the life of one of his friends..
In the final few weeks, a bombshell was dropped. Due to time constraints, branching dialogue trees were no longer possible, meaning that a massive amount of our dialogue had to be restructured and cut. Within a week we all had reformatted our dialogue. But this left us with a dilemma. Originally, the main character had a character-writing philosophy similar to Mass Effect's Commander Shepard. But the move to linear dialogue required us to create a specific, new character for him. We settled on a more laconic, wise old man who remains equally optimistic and skeptical.
Our final version, however, was even more reductionist. The Grand Master no longer speaks but instead is a silent protagonist (except for in the opening cutscene). In the end, The Grand Master became a much of an emergent story instead, with an instance based narrative with individual encounters making up most of it.