Narrative Designer (August 2019 – Present)
I wrote for character-driven roleplaying games in collaboration with my team. I focused on reactive dialogue, fleshing out documentation, and developing quests and characters alongside other departments. I specialized in building branching stories by mapping our game’s logic and hooking it up through markup. I also attended voiceover sessions to provide direction for my characters.
Projects:
Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines 2
My focuses were on designing and writing characters, reactive plot, quests and documentation. I worked in an internal Unreal 4 narrative tool to script out reactive dialogue, using markup logic to branch out quests and important story beats alongside level and content designers.
Highlights include:
- Teaming up with systems and level design to develop a “reactivity” strike team. We broke down main story quests and came up with solutions on how players could approach objectives based on their character build. Stealth, dialogue feats and combat players were always considered in various ways to complete tasks in-game. Depending on the choices they made, they would also receive a variety of consequences — ranging from reactive conversations, impacting story, and influencing the relations they established with non-player characters.
- I worked closely with a variety of departments to build cohesive, innovative main story and side quests. Together we would bounce ideas in an open-room pitch to expand and build off of each other’s skillsets and creativity to make quests engaging.
- I was given ownership of a variety of main and side characters. As such, I would be the primary person to write their dialogue, flesh out their personality and share it across the team. If coworkers ever had a question about what one of my characters would do or say in a given situation, I would be the one they’d go to answers for. I also developed their relationships with the player, giving a variety of branching branching variations ranging from friendship, romantic, to a strained companionship. These relationships would influence how these characters treated the player, showcased in dialogue and reactive quest variables.
- I got to work on fleshing out the last act of the game. We focused on using markup to create reactive, story-branching quest objectives in order to create a unique, personalized experiences for players.
- I was able to work with voice directors to assist the voiceover process, helping actors establish the voice and tone for characters and dialogue I’d written.
- Since I have a background in scripting and building blueprints in Unreal 4, I was able to assist content designers with implementation if needed.
- I was able to create detailed documentation in Confluence to track the game’s themes and stories, making the work in narrative design accessible across the studio.
Portfolio samples can be given on request, for job applications only.
Cancelled Game Project
- Time on Project: December 2020 – February 2021
I helped develop the early stages of pre-production for a new IP. With the rest of the narrative team, I fleshed out a story bible and started to build a world around a newly pitched sci-fi adventure game. My focus was on navigating how to blend the project’s story and gameplay, and expanding on the history and lifecycle for fictional species.
Nicole Stanford 