Role
Systems Developer
& Technical Narrative Designer
Date
January 2025 – Feburary 2025
Project Type
Class Project – Game Prototype
Tools
Unreal Engine 5, Visual Studio, Rider, Diversion
Tasks & Responsibilities
* Designed and developed a screenplay parser.
* Designed and developed interaction, damage, health, inventory, and dialogue prompt systems.
* Coordinated with the narrative designers.
* Assisted other developers with system design, implementation, and debugging.
Kikilo: The Stolen Hero was a group project for 2 of the courses for the M.S. in Game Design at Full Sail University. As a group, we determined what the project was going to involve with weekly deadlines for 2 of our 1-month courses. I focused on developing narrative-based systems, coordinating with the narrative designers, and assisting the other developers.
Research Summary:
In the GDC talk Skill-Building Series: Making The Designer-Writer Collaboration Work, Sarah O’Connor talked about how crucial it is for designers and writers to collaborate for impactful game narratives, and that is what I set out to do as a system designer and developer for Kikilo: The Stolen Hero.
As a team, we wanted the player to have multiple dialogue paths to choose from, allowing the player to make the story their own, a key strategy that O’Connor discussed in her GDC talk. To better enable the narrative designers to accomplish this goal, I developed a screenplay parser and dialogue prompt system capable of handling branching narratives, based on the film-based screenplay format provided by Bradford Hillam. By developing this system, I allowed the player to choose their story as they played the game and enabled the narrative designers to focus on the story and their writing instead of any technical details about implementation.